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The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

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"LET’S START WITH THE END of the world, why don’t we? Get it over with and move on to more interesting things.

First, a personal ending. There is a thing she will think over and over in the days to come, as she imagines how her son died and tries to make sense of something so innately senseless. She will cover Uche’s broken little body with a blanket—except his face, because he is afraid of the dark—and she will sit beside it numb, and she will pay no attention to the world that is ending outside. The world has already ended within her, and neither ending is for the first time. She’s old hat at this by now.

What she thinks then, and thereafter, is: But he was free.

And it is her bitter, weary self that answers this almost question every time her bewildered, shocked self manages to produce it:

He wasn’t. Not really. But now he will be."

REVIEW

Book One of the Broken Earth series, The Fifth Season is a wonderfully rich, dystopian sci fi book with strong touches of fantasy from Black author N.K. Jemisin.

The world-building here is epic.Jemisin weaves a tale of three women protagonists struggling to survive in a world in which the natural world itself is an enemy.

They live on an unstable planet whose violent eruptions can only be controlled by people born with special magic called orogenes (see our three main characters).

Where they live, in the Stillness, rather than being considered saviors, orogenes are feared, shunned, killed or enslaved by the world's elites.

Toxic as their planet already is the people of the Stillness live in fear of a "fifth season" that might bring earthquakes and eruptions so severe that they will mean the end.

There are recognizable themes here - oppression, cultural conflict, racism, enslavement, environmental degradation, yet also love, hope, family and resilience.

"The Fifth Season" can be a hard read because it is heavy at times, drops you straight into the story and uses second person present tense throughout.

However, the story and compelling characters push you along as well as Jemison's prose which is clear and almost lyrical.

There may not be an instant click but the story that unfolds is worth waiting for. Most readers say their investment began and things began to coalesce for them fifty to eighty pages in.

While I'd class this as high or epic fantasy-sci-fi, unlike what we'd find in many books in this category, here we have queer characters, a well-drawn polyamorous relationship, "found families" and people of various races and genders. Black characters are centered -- refreshing as this tends to be a rarity in this genre.

Big ideas breathe in this novel.

Buy The Fifth Season here

BOOK BLURB

Three terrible things happen in a single day. Essun, a woman living an ordinary life in a small town, comes home to find that her husband has brutally murdered their son and kidnapped their daughter.

Meanwhile, mighty Sanze -- the world-spanning empire whose innovations have been civilization's bedrock for a thousand years -- collapses as most of its citizens are murdered to serve a madman's vengeance.

And worst of all, across the heart of the vast continent known as the Stillness, a great red rift has been torn into the heart of the earth, spewing ash enough to darken the sky for years. Or centuries.

Now Essun must pursue the wreckage of her family through a deadly, dying land. Without sunlight, clean water, or arable land, and with limited stockpiles of supplies, there will be war all across the Stillness: a battle royale of nations not for power or territory, but simply for the basic resources necessary to get through the long dark night.

Essun does not care if the world falls apart around her. She'll break it herself, if she must, to save her daughter.

Buy The Fifth Season here

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

N.K. (Nora Keita) Jemisin, a Black American woman, lives and writes from Brooklyn, New York. She's a graduate of Tulane University and the University of Maryland.

Jemisin was the first author to win the prestigious (science fiction) Hugo Award for Best Novel in three consecutive years with the Broken Earth series of which this book is the first, as well as the first author to win for all three novels in a trilogy.

"But another thing I tried to touch on in the Broken Earth is that life in a hard world is never just the struggle. Life is family, blood and found. Life is those allies who prove themselves worthy by actions and not just talk. Life means celebrating every victory, no matter how small."

Quote from N.K. Jemisin from her Hugo Award acceptance speech for the Broken World trilogy

BY N.K. JEMISIN

The Broken World Trilogy

The City We Became (First book of the Great Cities Trilogy)

The Inheritance Trilogy

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