The Stone Sky - N. K. Jemisin (The Broken Earth #3)

N. K. Jemisin has come to the conclusion of her latest series with The Stone Sky, wrapping up her Broken Earth trilogy, which began with the Hugo-winning The Fifth Season.  While I absolutely loved The Fifth Season, I thought that the second book, The Obelisk Gate, fell victim to a serious case of second book syndrome with nothing really happening.  But by the end of the second book, things were shaping up in a mildly more-interesting direction, with main-character Essun's daughter, Nassun, entering the picture as a serious character in and of herself.

The pacing of this book is rather slow; a lot of it is the process of Essun and her new comm moving on from their now-unusable home and to another abandoned settlement.  Meanwhile, Nassun decides that she's going to destroy the world and sets about figuring out how to do it.  All of this takes a startling amount of the book, and a lot of the rest of it is padded out with a series of chapters that are, essentially, info-dumping on Hoa's past and how the world got to be the way it is.  This seems to have been a trope I've encountered in a few series lately--wait until the last book and then just infodump all of the background that wasn't really worked in elsewhere.  But the background focusing on Hoa means the first-person segments are expanded, so the book is pretty evenly divided between first-, second-, and third-person chunks, focusing on Hoa, Essun, and Nassun respectively.

Ultimately, this was not as good a book as the first one in the series was.  In the end, I felt like Jemisin had come full-circle back to her first book, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.  The way the narrative is structured is very similar, as are significant parts of the plot, even if the world-building and overall story are very different.  There is some really good characterization; Jemisin notes in her acknowledgements that she really struggled with the idea of motherhood in this series and this book in particular, and it shows in Essun's internal struggle regarding Nassun and her other children.  Hoa is given added dimension with his background, but I'm not entirely sure that it's worth the info-dumping, and a few other characters are characterized excellently but summarily written off, which had a very strange feel to it.

Overall, a book I enjoyed, definitely stronger than the second, but without the snap and sizzle of Jemisin's other series.

3 stars out of 5.