Read #2: January 5th, 2020

This book still slaps. I will say the emotionally traumatic scenes hit less hard on reread cause I was expecting them.

(Also, Innon is still the only good man on this world)

Read #1: July 23rd, 2019
The Fifth Season is God Tier™. Given the praise and accolades lauded to NK Jemisin over the last three years for this trilogy I expected this book to be incredibly dense and too literary for my tastes. Boy, was I wrong. The Fifth Season is approachable and so entertaining.

The Fifth Season takes place on the Stillness, a continent ravaged by natural disasters, seismic events and every so often world shaking apocalypses. Orogenes are people with the power to control the earth itself and still tectonic plates movements, however, they are extremely oppressed and forced into a form of slavery by the reigning empire of the Stillness, the Sanzed. I don’t want to say more about the plot of the novel because unravelling this story as you read it is part of the fun of it.

This book was unexpectedly funny. Jemisin’s prose is witty and sharp. From the first line of this book I fell in love with her authorial voice. “Let’s start with the end of the world, why don’t we? Get it over with and move on to more interesting things.” Is on hell of an opening. If a line like that doesn’t make you want to read more I don’t know what would. Not only is Jemisin funny but her prose is well crafted and goes down like lemonade on a hot summer day.

I will warn that one perspective in the novel is told in second person while the others are in third. That personally didn’t bother me, I ended up really loving the directness of second person in that instance and it really fit with the character but i get that it’s not for everyone.

The book is about oppression and how the structures designed to to oppress are malignant forces in the world. Throughout the story we see the ultimate result of the structures of violence imposed on Orogenes by the Sanzed empire. Jemisin depicts horribly gruesome scenarios that viscerally impacted me. The violence enacted on Orogenes is multifaceted and well explored. We see the simple callousness of tight knit communities against perceived others alongside the taught internalized hatred woven into young Orogenes educations.

This book also explores trauma in a fascinating way. The main character of the book Essun experiences trauma starkly throughout the story. What I appreciated about her character was the strength and resilience she showed throughout the novel. Jemisin never denies Essun her vulnerability to fit the mould of “strong female character”. Essun experiences a lot and has cracks in her foundation which makes me love her all the more for it.

I can go into so much geeky detail about how Jemisin uses character foils to flesh out our main character excellently, or how her use of a nonlinear narrative makes the story all the more impactful and emotionally weighty, or how her magic system is described with precision elegance and depth, but I don’t want this review to be 18,000 words long.

I felt the urge to reread this book immediately after putting it down because there is so much to this book that i probably missed the first time around. This book has so much depth and detail and charm and I just adored living in this world.

The Fifth Season was masterful. I will likely be thinking about this book for a very long time. This is the kind of book that deserves to be unpacked and picked apart so read it with a book club or with another blogger I’m chomping at the bit to pick up the next book in the series because I need to know what the hell is gonna happen next.