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.

The Obelisk Gate - N. K. Jemisin (The Broken Earth #2)

After I finally got around to reading The Fifth Season a few weeks ago, I immediately ordered The Obelisk Gate to continue on.  This is a sin, because I ordered it from Amazon.  Forgive me.  I'd purchased The Fifth Season at Kramer's Books, a local bookstore (with a cafe called Afterwords, which is just so perfect) here Washington, DC, and I intended to do the same with The Obelisk Gate, but I didn't think it was likely I'd be near there by the time I wanted to read the next book, and besides, Kramer's usually only has one copy of each book out a time, so how could I know that this would be there when I got there?  It is new.  (And kudos to a publisher that releases in paperback right away.)

Well, the book came and about three days later I found myself at Kramer's.  I bought Seveneves instead.  I had The Obelisk Gate slated for one of the days in my weekend, to which someone asked, "You're going to read an entire book this weekend?"  Well...yes?  I mean, I typically read several.  On this particular weekend I didn't, because I ended up binge-watching Once Upon a Time and spending a significant amount of time lying on the couch groaning about how hard my life is in the wake of a run.  (I am not a good runner.)  But I did still read all of The Obelisk Gate.  And...

It suffers from second book syndrome.

It absolutely kills me to say this, but it's true.  The Fifth Season built up a complex world with several intertwined story lines on different timelines.  Unfortunately, at the end of that book, it was basically all transformed into backstory.  I felt that this didn't bode well for The Obelisk Gate, and I was right.  This book is a big bunch of nothing happening.  Nassun, Essun's daughter, takes the stage as a character, and her part is a bunch of walking and then mostly stuff that we've already seen from Essun in her various personas: trying to master orogeny.  Essun, meanwhile, just stays in one place and...doesn't do much.  She talks to Alabaster.  She talks to Tonkee.  She talks to other people.  There's talk of a moon but no one will really come out and say it.  There's talk of the Obelisk Gate and what she's supposed to do with it but not really any doing in itself.  A few things happen near the end, but honestly I didn't feel that they were big, plot-moving things on a grand scale, more things that were just thrown in to have some sort of climax for this book.  There is a bit more involvement of the stone eaters, which was interesting, and the writing remains decent, but that second-person tense is still killing me, the breakaways to first-person are distracting, and nothing really happened.  This is extremely frustrating to me because I like Jemisin so much, but this book just didn't work for me.  Second books in trilogies are hard, and this definitely fell prey to all of the problems that can plague them.  It was just "meh," overall, and because it's so hard to talk about a book that was just "meh," I'm going to leave it at that.

2 stars out of 5.

The Fifth Season - N. K. Jemisin (The Broken Earth #1)

"For all those who have to fight for the respect that everyone else is given without question."

Wow. How amazing of a book dedication of that? While it's relevant to the book, it's also particularly poignant in light of the fact that Jemisin just won a Hugo Award for The Fifth Season, against hordes of haters who tried to rig the system and are led by a guy who referred to her as an uncivilized "half-savage." And Jemisin writes so many characters who would easily fall into this category of having to fight for respect in our world, though in their own worlds they often end up having to fight for respect for entirely different reasons.

Let's use that as our jumping-off point, shall we? Jemisin writes a wide array of non-white characters (there are only a handful of white characters in this book, and most of them aren't even white in the traditional sense; they are LITERALLY WHITE) who also tend to be all along the spectrum of sexuality and who often have what we would probably consider non-traditional relationships. All of these people would definitely face heavy discrimination in our world. But that's the thing: in their own world, they don't. These things are just accepted, as they should be. Do these characters face discrimination? Yes. But here, it's for a completely different reason...

It's because our main characters are orogenes, otherwise called by the insulting term of rogga. What does this mean? It means that they can manipulate energy and consequently the earth itself, stealing life from other people, animals, and plants in the process. Orogenes are human, but they're not considered as such by the people of the Stillness, the land they inhabit. They're viewed as extremely dangerous and there's an entire order of people called Guardians who are devoted to keeping them in line and killing them if they step out of line. We know from the beginning of the book that our mains are orogenes, and we watch them struggle with this, and how wrong their treatment is, all through it.

This is a hard book to talk about without spoilers, but I'm going to try. The book starts with a man ripping open the Stillness, a land that's not actually still at all, and starting what the narrator refers to as "the last time" of the end of the world. It sets of a cataclysmic event that annihilates the largest, most powerful city on the planet and sends everyone from the equatorial zone scampering for safety further north and south. But that won't help them much, because it's heavily implied this is going to be a disaster that will take thousands of years to go away. In the midst of all this is Essun, whose chapters are written in the second person singular tense (which I'm not particularly fond of) and who is mourning the death of her child, who her husband killed after finding out the kid was an orogene. Essun herself is an orogene, but this was only known by her two children and one other friend in her village. She accidentally betrays her powers and is forced to leave the village, but that's okay, she was going to anyway, because her husband has also made off with her other (also an orogene) child, and she is determined to get her daughter back.

We have two other story threads going on as well. The first is that of the young girl Damaya, who has been discovered as an orogene by her village and parents and is being shipped off to the Fulcrum, a school where orogenes are turned into weapons for the use of the empire. The second is that of Syenite, a four-ringed (which is basically a level-four, of ten) orogene who is being sent on a mission with the only ten-ringed orogene currently in existence. Oh, and she's also supposed to get pregnant from this guy along the way, because the Fulcrum wants a steady supply of strong orogenes to feed its needs.

Syenite's story was definitely the most intriguing and, I think, the strongest. Damaya's pretty much felt like a typical supernatural school story to me, most of the time, with her dealing with hazing and learning her abilities and getting into trouble. Essun's was mostly a lot of walking, though a few interesting things came out of it along the way. But the real big reveals, and the real big events, all happen within Syenite's story, which meant that when I hit an Essun or Dayama chapter, I found myself flipping ahead to see how long it would be until we got back to Syenite. There was a weird time-jump in her story at one point, though, which felt very choppy to me and did disrupt my "flow." But I think we really see this world through this story line, more than the others, and I was sad to see it end, because it's pretty obviously not going to continue in the next two books in the series.

Also, I think the book as a whole read better during the body than it did in retrospect, after the end. During the main reading, it's not outright said but is definitely apparent that Damay and Syenite's stories take place before the cataclysm that starts the book, mainly because, well, the world isn't ending. But when they all get tied together at the end, it makes them feel much more like plain old backstory than compelling plotlines on their own, and I liked them as separate plotlines; I think it would have felt much neater if they had been, and had just been tied into the Essun one.

Do I think this is Jemisin's strongest work? Well...no. I much preferred The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, which was her first book (and was also nominated for a Hugo but lost out to a book called Blackout/All Clear, which I haven't read so I can't tell if the loss was "deserved"), but she continues to build intriguing worlds with vibrant characters who come out of very different molds than what we typically see in fantasy, and I think that's very important. I think I would put this one below The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and The Broken Kingdoms, both of which I liked very much, but above the Kingdom of the Gods and the Dreamblood books, which I didn't like as much. Still, there are two books left to go in this series, and Jemisin is really masterful with worldbuilding, so I'm intrigued to see where these will go. It definitely seems like they're going to be more direct sequels than the other connected books she's written so far, so it'll be interesting to see how she handles an outright series more than "companion" books for the first time.

4 stars out of 5.

The Shadowed Sun - N. K. Jemisin (Dreamblood #2)

N. K. Jemisin is an amazing fantasy author, and anyone who hasn't read her definitely should at the next available opportunity.  She has a way of creating lush worlds, complex characters, and having an actual diverse cast in her books, which is pretty outstanding for fantasy novels.  Main characters who aren't always straight and white?  Who actually (that I can remember) have never been both straight and white?  Shocking!  In such a good way!  Her Hundred Thousand Kingdoms trilogy was outstanding, with the titular first book being one of my favorite fantasy books of all time.  The Dreamblood duo was her second series put out.  I read the first book in the duo, The Killing Moon, early last year, and it took me forever to finally get around to this one.  At first I was a bit disoriented, because some of the characters in the second book follow through from the first (though the main characters are new) and the events are strongly linked, though there was a time skip between the two volumes.  However, I pushed on, and either remembered enough or gathered from what was written.  I'd say that reading the two books close together would definitely be helpful, but it isn't strictly necessary.

This story picks up several years after the events of The Killing Moon.  The city of Gujaareh is now occupied by the Kisuati Protectorate.  The Hetawa, the temple in charge of the dream magic that fuels Gujaareh's existence, has taken in its first female Sharer, Hanani.  She's trying to rise above her apprenticeship and become a full-fledged healer when tragedy strikes: a dream plague that kills all it touches, and spreads from sleeper to sleeper.  At first, Hanani is blamed for the deaths, but when it becomes clear that the plague is beyond her, the Gatherer Nijiri bestows a new trial upon her: free Gujaareh.  To complete this task, he sends her into the desert to Wanahomen, Gujaareh's exiled prince and heir to the throne who is scheming to retake his kingdom and his crown.

At first, I loved Hanani's chapters and hated Wanahomen's.  He was a jerk.  I did not like him, and found myself paging ahead, looking for the next place Hanani would come in.  Once their paths converged, however, I think Jemisin did a very good job weaving the two together.  Hanani ended up bringing out different sides to Wanahomen, ones that were much more flattering, despite their constant butting of heads.  Hanani's struggles to understand a foreign culture seemed genuine, but despite her pain and frustration she longed to do well, and that complex mix of emotions and motivations lead her down a complicated road.  The story also picked up a good bit once the two met up in the desert, which redeemed the book from what was an interesting, but sometimes slow beginning.

This book has more of a romance plot than the first did; the first featured a very intense relationship, but I'm not sure I would call it a romance.  I wasn't sure I would call this one a romance at first, either, but it grew in an interesting way and definitely ended as one.  However, I think that positive, consensual relationship, complicated as it could be, was desperately needed in order to balance out some of the less savory aspects of the book.  Jemisin doesn't pull punches when it comes to including unpleasant truths in her books, and in this one rape, abuse, and incest feature prominently--though not amongst the protagonists.  Which is good, because it's very hard to make a raping, incestuous person a protagonist.

Sunandi, Nijiri, and Nijiri's surviving Gatherer brothers all carry over from the first book.  While some chapters feature them, they are not prominent characters, and are more used to keep us filled in with what is happening in Gujaareh after Hanani leaves for the desert.  Their characterizations were consistent with the first book of the duo, but again, can stand on their own for readers who didn't read (or forgot) The Killing Moon.  Some of the intricacies of narcomancy and the Hetawa would be lost on a newcomer, but this story isn't really about that; it's about an unlikely love story, the pain of lost relationships on all sides, and the struggle to retake a city that thrives on peace, but is on the brink of war.  It's a complex set of threads, and again, Jemisin is absolutely masterful in weaving them together.  While I didn't love this as much as I loved The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, I think it comes in as my second-favorite Jemisin book, and I can't wait to read her newest offering, The Fifth Season.

A solid four stars out of five.

This book also fulfilled my Popsguar 2016 Reading Challenge category for "A book from the library."