The Fifth Season
The Broken Earth trilogy, Book 1
N. K. Jemisin
Orbit
Fiction, Fantasy/Sci-Fi
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Countless generations ago, the world ended, destroyed by the fury of Father Earth. The years since have been swept by Seasons of plague and famine and earthquakes and worse, yet through it all, somehow, humans have endured, passing down stonelore and rebuilding comms on the bones of dead civilizations and developing sensory organs to "sess" coming tremors. Some, known as orogenes, even possess the power to calm and shape the unstable earth of the Stillness, the last remaining large land mass of the broken world.
This Season will be different. This time, Father Earth and his "stone-eater" children of living rock will destroy the hated humans utterly. And he will have help...
Essun's shale-plain life in a shale-plain comm shatters when she comes home to find her youngest child dead on the floor, killed by her husband Jiju. The boy's hidden orogene powers must have revealed themselves in the last quake... and now Jiju has taken her daughter away. She will hunt the man to the ends of the Stillness and beyond if she must to save the girl, and reveal gifts she has kept hidden for years.
Young Damaya's parents shut her away in the barn like an animal when she displayed orogeny; "roggas" are feared and loathed, able to destroy with a thought if their powers run wild. Now a Guardian comes to take her to the Fulcrum, where her kind are trained to serve, not harm... and where they are kept always in their place, exterminated if they step out of line.
Syenite thought she might have been on the way to greater things at the Fulcrum when she's assigned to accompany (and breed with) Alabaster, perhaps the most powerful orogene yet trained. But traveling with him forces her to see the darkness beneath the surface of the Fulcrum, the Sanzed empire, and their cracked and angered world. Once seen, she find she can no longer ignore it - but can she hope to do anything to stop it?
REVIEW: Jemisin presents one of the most unique and terrible worlds I've read in ages in this much-lauded book. She even manages to pull off a second-person point of view, for reasons that become clear toward the end. Unfortunately, it took me over half the book to begin to care about anyone; not only is it a somewhat slow-burn start (things happen, but caring about why takes quite some time), but the Stillness is so harsh it produces only harsh people who build harsh communities, making the characters difficult to connect with. Until then, my interest in the Stillness kept me reading. Jemisin creates a diverse post-apocalyptic world (or post-post-apocalyptic; the planet has been devastated by innumerable apocalypses by the time the story starts), without the tendency to monolithic cultures that some writers fall back on out of tradition, woven with a deep history (that, naturally, tends to be skewed to always favor those in power and the current Way Of Doing Things.) The closest to an unbiased record of the past is the "stonelore," instructions and records passed down since the first cataclysm, though over the years even those have been lost or misinterpreted or deliberately concealed or destroyed. Orogeny melds geology and science and magic in a unique blend that feels more like science fiction than traditional magic; that and the development of "sessapinnae" organs - an extra sense possessed by everyone, even "stills" (the majority, who lack orogenic gifts) - is why I split the genre. By the end, the three threads have come together, setting up the next volume, in what feels less like a conclusion to a book than a pause in a longer arc. Will I read on? For all that I found the writing great and the world interesting, I'm still on the fence about that, especially if it entails saving a civilization that, frankly, deserves a good extermination.
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