Review: The Stone Sky

Title: The Stone Sky

Series: The Broken Earth #3

Author: N.K. Jemisin

Genre: Fantasy/Apocalyptic

Trigger Warnings: Death, blood, body horror (severe), gore, death of children, menstruation (mentions), heterosexual sex (mentions), natural disasters, excrement

Spoiler Warning: This book is the conclusion of a trilogy, so this review will inveitably contain spoilers of the first two books. Proceed at your own risk.

Back Cover:

This is the way the world ends… for the last time.

The Moon will soon return. Whether this heralds the destruction of humankind or something worse will depend on two women.

Essun has inherited the power of Alabaster Tenring. With it, she hopes to find her daughter Nassun and forge a world in which every orogene child can grow up safe.

For Nassun, her mother’s mastery of the Obelisk Gate comes too late. She has seen the evil of the world, and accepted what her mother will not admit: that sometimes what is corrupt cannot be cleansed, only destroyed.

Review:

The Stone Sky is an ending. The end of the series, the end of so many lives, in many ways the end of the world contained within these books. And it is very, very good.

This book again had the perspectives of Essun and Nassun, but also the third persepctive of Hoa. And this time around I actually did enjoy all three different perspectives – although I mainly liked Nassun’s perspective because she was seeing interesting things in the present world and Hoa’s because it was mostly from when he was young tens of thousands of years ago and gave context for what the world used to be like and what happened to make it so terrible. Of the main characters in the story, Essun is still the only one I really, truly care about.

That was the most interesting part of the book for me – learning about the past, the context, what society was like before the Seasons started, what and why the obelisks are, and how Father Earth came to see the life on its surface as an enemy. If The Fifth Season was about Essun and The Obelisk Gate was about feelings and internal journeys, The Stone Sky is about the past – how the world was broken, how Essun could put it back together to build a better future for her children, and how Nassun could tear it apart to end the hatred that fills the cracks and has shattered her young life over and over.

I knew that this is not the type of story or world where I would find a happy ending. There has been so much darkness and death and trauma in these books that a happy ending would feel cheap. But I did expect the ending to feel more satisfying than it did. Some of that may have to do with the fact that I liked Essun drastically more than Nassun and wasn’t super happy with how big of a role Nassun played in the climax. It was a reasonable ending, and probably as happy as it could have been considering what kind of story this is, but it left me feeling not completely satisfied.

I thoroughly enjoyed every book in this trilogy, and all of them are really, really fantastic books with good characters, an amazing world, a beautifully complex plot, and a ton of depth in multiple areas. But after being so completely blown away by The Fifth Season, the last two books seemed shorter, less layered, slightly anticlimactic by comparison. They’re still great and absolutely worth reading and I would recommend the whole trilogy without hesitation, but the first is by far the best of the three.

The Broken Earth series:

1. The Fifth Season
2. The Obelisk Gate
3. The Stone Sky

Review: The Obelisk Gate

Title: The Obelisk Gate

Series: The Broken Earth #2

Author: N.K. Jemisin

Genre: Fantasy/Apocalyptic

Trigger Warnings: Death, death of children, child abuse, child emotional abuse and manipulation, blood, body horror, suicide (mention), death of parent, natural disasters

Spoiler Warning: This book is second in a series and so this review contains spoilers of the first book, The Fifth Season. Also it will probably make very little sense without the context of what happened in book one.

Back Cover:

This is the way the world ends… for the last time.

The season of endings grows darker as civilization fades into the long cold night. Alabaster Tenring – madman, world-crusher, savior – has returned with a mission: to train his successor, Essun, and thus seal the fate of the Stillness forever.

It continues with a lost daughter, found by the enemy.

It continues with the obelisks, and an ancient mystery converging on answers at last.

The Stillness is the wall which stands against the flow of tradition, the spark of hope long buried under the thickening ashfall. And it will not be broken.

Review:

This is best read in quick succession with The Fifth Season, because that book ends in the middle of a conversation and this book picks up with the rest of it. So you jump right back into everything that was fantastic about The Fifth Season.

Excepting a few interludes with minor characters, this book only has two perspectives: Essun and Nassun. I fell right back into Essun’s story easily, picking up where I left off from book one. Even though it satisfied my curiosity to see what happened to Nassun and where she went after Jija took her away, I really struggled with her parts of the story.

I hated Nassun for loving the people who abused her in the same way I hate my younger self for loving the people who abused me: Knowing we couldn’t have survived any other way, knowing bonding is a natural response when the people we rely on hurt us, but still wishing we had been aware enough or brave enough or something enough to know that we didn’t deserve to be hurt and to say “No!” and escape and not be hurt any more. I hated her because I know what it’s like to be her and we were both children too young to know it was wrong for trusted adults to hurt us but somehow I still blame her and me for not being able to escape.

… This is the kind of book that brings up traumas. The traumas of Nassun’s story were more poignant for me than the ones of Essun’s story because I relate more to being an abused child than being a mother who has lost children, but this book is good at poking at all kinds of traumas of loss and abuse.

This book is very, very good. However, I do think it deserves the criticism lobbied at it that it’s not as good as the first book. In The Fifth Season, everything happens – it’s packed to bursting with action and new insights and learning about this world. The Obelisk Gate is markedly slower, and not just because it’s over 100 pages shorter. Much less happens. It’s more of an inner journey in this book. Nassun and Essun are dealing with their traumas as best they can while trying to make living where they are work and learning more about their orogeny and “magic,” which is orogeny and also not. (I’ll be honest, I didn’t really understand it, but it was also really cool and I didn’t really care that I didn’t get the difference between the two.) It’s building up to do something really big in book three, but hardly anything happens in this book.

That said, even though I didn’t like The Obelisk Gate as much as I adored The Fifth Season, it was still an engrossing and fascinating read and I am absolutely going to read book three. (And the way everything is shaping up, I may have to revise what genre I think these books are. We’ll see.)

The Broken Earth series:

1. The Fifth Season
2. The Obelisk Gate
3. The Stone Sky

Review: The Fifth Season

Title: The Fifth Season

Series: The Broken Earth #1

Author: N.K. Jemisin

Genre: Fantasy/Apocalyptic

Trigger Warnings: Child abuse, child death, murder of children, blood, natural disasters, mild body horror, explicit sexual content, reluctant/coerced sex

Back Cover:

This is the way the world ends … for the last time.

It starts with the great red rift across the heart of the world’s sole continent, spewing ash that blots out the sun. It starts with death, with a murdered son and a missing daughter. It starts with betrayal, and long dormant wounds rising up to fester.

This is the Stillness, a land long familiar with catastrophe, where the power of the earth is wielded as a weapon. And where there is no mercy.

Read the first book in the critically acclaimed, three-time Hugo award-winning trilogy by NYT bestselling author N. K. Jemisin.

Review:

A man and a living statue tear open the ground and end the world. A geode cracks open and a child emerges. A mother comes home to find her toddler son beaten to death. And three different storylines converge into a single intense, dark, tangled, brilliant story.

It’s so hard to pick out any of the elements of this story and talk about them individually because everything in this book is interconnected. People, environment, tradition, those in power, those without, cities, rural villages, deadly natural disasters, all influence and are influenced by each other.

The worldbuilding is phenomenal. Society and people and everything are shaped by the fact of living on an inhospitible planet, where “Father Earth” periodically sends “seasons” of disasters in an attempt to wipe out all life. Time is counted in how many seasons a place has survived. And everyone hates and fears the people who have power to control the earth, to soothe it – or kindle its fury – at their whim.

There are three storylines in this book. Demaya is a child with this power to control earth, and when her family discovers it they despise her and are all too happy to give her away to the Fulcrum, where people like her are trained for the good of the Stillness. Seyenite has been trained, abused, and molded by the Fulcrum into a weapon, but a simple mission supervised by the strange and extraordinarily powerful Alabaster starts to unravel everything she thought she knew. And Essun lived a relatively happy life in a small village with her husband and two children, until her husband murders her son and kidnaps her daughter and she sets out to find them.

Unlike most books that have multiple storylines, I enjoyed every single one of these plots and sets of characters. This book did so many things right. From intense experiences being accurate without being overwhelming or feeling cheap on the page, to the complicated feelings of a child being told the person hurting her is doing it for her own good, to sex scenes that not only didn’t make me uncomfortable but that I actually enjoyed, this book is stunning.

Everything in this story is connected. Every. single. thing. The Fifth Season is not only following this varied cast of characters through their adventures, it’s peeling back layers of the society – to the characters and to the reader – and exposing the horrors within, and providing threads of mystery that it deftly weaves into a fascinating, astonishing tapestry. Even up to the very last word of the book (literally), threads are still being woven into the bigger picture. And though you technically could stop the journey here and not read the rest of the series, why would you want to?

The Broken Earth series:

1. The Fifth Season
2. The Obelisk Gate
3. The Stone Sky

Review: Monument 14

Title:  Monument 14

Series: Monument 14 #1

Author:  Emmy Laybourne

Genre:  Apocalyptic

Back Cover:

Dean is on his way to school when a massive hailstorm hits hard enough to demolish the bus.  By the time it’s over, six high school kids (some popular, some not), two eighth graders (one a tech genius), and six little kids are trapped in a Greenway superstore.  They build a refuge for themselves inside.  But the hailstorm wasn’t the beginning, and it won’t be the end.  The world as they know it is tearing itself apart.

Review:

I picked up this book because not only do I like a good post-apocalyptic story, I was curious what kind of problems these kids would have, since the obvious food and water problems wouldn’t apply for a while.

Dean, the main character, was not what I expected.  As the main character in a post-apocalyptic story, I expected him to be the take-charge, keeping-everybody-alive kind of guy.  And he wasn’t.  He was more of a follower than a leader, not great with people, and awkward with girls.  But, somehow, I liked him anyway.

Niko was the kind of guy I expected as the main character.  The kind of always-be-prepared, take-charge leader, who wasn’t exactly friendly but knew how to get the job done.  He was frequently harsh and/or distrustful, which kept him from being my favorite character, but it was definitely a good thing he was there.

Jake, I didn’t particularly like.  He was the womanizing jock type, and spent half the time drunk or high.  Although he could be nice at times, for the most part, he was a jerk.

Josie, once she got over the initial shock, was…I’m not sure exactly what to call her.  She was a leader, but better with people than with strategy.  Frankly, I think if she wasn’t around, the little kids would have been a huge problem.

There were fourteen characters in all, which is a pretty big cast, but it actually worked out.  Astrid, one of the high school kids, was AWOL for about half of the story, and Braydon, the other one, mostly went along with Jake.  For about the first half of the book, I got the six little kids mixed up.  Even towards the end if a kid hadn’t been mentioned for a while, when they came up again, I’d have a “who is that again?” moment.

I really can’t say much about the plot, because the characters are the plot, if that makes sense.  Since they were stuck in a supermart, survival wasn’t really the focus.  The focus was the characters themselves and how they handled the disasters and each other.  This is definitely what I’d call character-driven fiction, and it’s done brilliantly.  All the emotions felt very real, and even though I didn’t agree with everything they did, it was perfectly understandable.

Normally, character-driven plots aren’t something I go for, but I really enjoyed this story.  I’m looking forward to reading the sequel, Sky on Fire, when it comes out in May.

The Monument 14 series:

1. Monument 14
2. Sky On Fire
3. Savage Drift