Possible spoilers for The Fifth Season – Proceed with awareness.
The Obelisk Gate is the second book in the Broken Earth Trilogy. In this installment, we follow two main stories – Essun and Nassun after each has arrived at a new, but separate, comm and the years that follow.
Nassun is Essun’s daughter. Nassun had been taken by her father, Jija, after he murdered her little brother, Uche. We heard of them in the first book, but we officially meet them as they travel south in the immediate aftermath of the breaking of the world until they wind up at a comm that is supposed to be able to cure orogenes of their “affliction”. Instead of being cured, Nassun excels at learning how to be a better, stronger orogene. But while she is incredibly powerful, she is ultimately a lost, young girl who was betrayed by the people who were supposed to protect her and love her. It is sad and frustrating to watch her have to navigate things that are way outside of what a 10 year old girl should be responsible for dealing with, and I hope that she is better taken care of in the next book. (But, I won’t hold my breath).
Essun spent the first book searching for Nassun until hitting a dead-end at Castrima, a comm that seems to allow the inclusion of orogenes. This part of the story is one part village logistics concerned with keeping a few hundred people alive during a Season, and one training the student to be the master before Bad Things happen.
As with the previous book, the reader is rewarded for their patience as answers to mysteries posed throughout the story are slowly rolled out over time. I don’t feel like the story itself moved too slowly as there was always something happening in each chapter, but it definitely takes focus (at least for me) to keep a grasp on all of the loose ends floating about until they get tied up later in the story.
One of the other pervasive features is how matter-of-fact The Horrors are – this is a hard, mean world and the people in it are trying to survive while navigating how The Horrors affect them. It is interesting to see how characters are impacted by different Horrors and what that means for how they continue to interact with the world or what character growth they undertake. I’m hopeful that the characters get some respite as a result of the finale in the next book because they are also clearly tired of The Horrors, but I guess we’ll see.
