A good friend gave me this book a few years ago as a very strong recommendation for the series. Intending to read it right away, I immediately purchased the rest of the trilogy. Then they sat on my shelf for a while. After reading Amina Al-Sirafi, I wanted to dig into Shannon Chakraborty’s trilogy. So, off I skipped to the local bookshop only to find that they had 1 and 3 in stock, but #2 would take a few weeks to arrive. Rather than be patient, I browsed my shelves for something else that would occupy me while those arrived, and here we are at the end of The Fifth Season. Wasn’t that interesting? Then I found $20?
Anyways.
The Fifth Season is the first book in the Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin. I have read her Inheritance Trilogy and the Great Cities books previously which I think was helpful for expectation setting. Having read a bit of her work already, I was prepared to feel dumb and like I was always missing more information that I would like. Books like this really reinforce that I prefer to read books on paper with my eyes (rather than ebooks or audiobooks). My attention waxes and wanes, and with a paper book I can flip around, go back easily to past chapters to jog my memory, or skip ahead to look for tiny little spoilers that help make things make sense. This might make it sound like I didn’t like this book, which is not right – it was a great read, and I’m very excited to dig into the next one.
The book starts by introducing Essun and the end of the world. The world has ended many times, but this is the last. Essun is sitting with her tiny son who she has found murdered by her husband in their home, and her daughter is missing – taken by her husband. We then see a man of unknown description with unknown motivations psychically reach into the continent and break it apart starting a Season that will last thousands of years.
We find out through the course of the introduction and the world building that flows through the book that the continent – The Stillness – is fraught with geological and other natural disasters that will occasionally and unpredictably trigger a Fifth Season. Fifth Seasons are winters brought on by disasters that can last months or years or in this case millennia. Much of the culture across The Stillness is built towards how to survive a Season and how to manage the orogenes. Orogenes are people with the power to manipulate earth and energy – giving real big Earthbender from Avatar: The Last Airbender vibes, only oppressed.
The rest of the book follows three separate stories that each serve as individual strands of a braid showing us both the Before Times and the Immediately After Times of this apocalypse. It was an incredible and satisfying read, and I’m looking forward to the rest of the trilogy. Each strand of the braid presents a compelling story with interesting characters, while simultaneously serving to build out the world, and provide context for the overarching question posed by the introduction – why did this man break the world? Or maybe, what did the world do to deserve to be broken?
