Fifth Season (2016)

By N K Jemisin

512pp, Fiction

Notes

2019-08-18

Well! It’s been a while, mainly because I tend to post whenever I finish reading a book and I’ve been reading a big ol’ fantasy trilogy: The Broken Earth by N.K. Jemisin all 3 volumes of the series won the Hugo over consecutive years and I think deservedly so.

Impressions: The series is pretty uneven – as trilogies can tend to be, what turns out to be interesting plot wise by book three isn’t necessarily what the author thought it might be at the start of book one. I really liked the first two books but felt the third misfired. The world explored in the first two books has interesting things to say about who gets to be an insider and an outsider and how societies react to and prepare for crises. It’s tightly imagined and the themes knit well with the plot. The first two books provide a really interesting lens through which to think about and reflect on power, privlege and race. The third books zooms out and explains how the world came to be and embeds the characters struggles within a broader epic millenia long conflict but this never really landed for me.