Every Age Must Come To An End

I recently finished reading The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin. This is book #1 in the Broken Earth Trilogy.

~POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT~

  Rating: 3/5 stars

"This is the way the world ends. Again.

Three terrible things happen in a single day. Essun, a woman living an ordinary life in a small town, comes home to find that her husband has brutally murdered their son and kidnapped their daughter. Meanwhile, mighty Sanze -- the world-spanning empire whose innovations have been civilization's bedrock for a thousand years -- collapses as most of its citizens are murdered to serve a madman's vengeance. And worst of all, across the heart of the vast continent known as the Stillness, a great red rift has been torn into the heart of the earth, spewing ash enough to darken the sky for years. Or centuries.

Now Essun must pursue the wreckage of her family through a deadly, dying land. Without sunlight, clean water, or arable land, and with limited stockpiles of supplies, there will be war all across the Stillness: a battle royale of nations not for power or territory, but simply for the basic resources necessary to get through the long dark night. Essun does not care if the world falls apart around her. She'll break it herself, if she must, to save her daughter."

The Fifth Season is interesting experiment by N. K. Jemisin. And while I would argue that it has been tremendously overrated, it is still, overall, a pretty good book with a lot of qualities. It reads more like an unpolished, interesting debut novel than an award-winning piece by an experienced author, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Let’s start with the criticism, why don’t we? (That is my attempt at paraphrasing the book’s opening sentence.) The writing style, alas, is unforgivably poor early on. The unfortunate combination of second person and present tense does absolutely not work without an explanation, and the fact that that explanation does come later on only means that the quality of the book increases as one approaches it. Until then, the book was most evocative of a BuzzFeed article in story format written by an edgy teenager who desperately wants to be a cool writer.

While that is the vibe I often get from Jemisin on a lot of points, she usually delivers anyway, and this book was no exception. I had a ton of issues with the book beyond just the initial one mentioned above (characterization is another thing Jemisin appears to be struggling with), but the writing style stopped bothering me as I went along, and there were also plenty of things that I greatly enjoyed.

The setting is one such. I would like to know a lot more about Fifth Seasons, obelisks, orogenes, and whatnot. The prologue provides an unnecessary infodump where the reader is flooded with information that the author then claims is irrelevant anyway (so why make me read that, Jemisin?), but beyond the first set of chapters, the book found a better pace, and the world became increasingly intriguing.

Similarly, I like the exploration of a great many social themes, including oppression, independence, and difference. The dedication of the book makes a clear point of what it sets out to do, and, almost ironically, I found it to be one of the most eloquently written sentences in the whole book: “For all those who have to fight for the respect that everyone else is given without question.” And indeed, the diversity of the cast and the setting add another layer of vividness to the reading experience.

Overall, the first Broken Earth book was a disappointment, but only because of the expectations imposed by the hype and the accolades. Had my expectations been a little lower, they might have been met by a daring and innovative novel, as this book very much deserves to be called. As it stands, it is still an intriguing introduction to a promising series, especially now that I know what to expect.

Check out The Fifth Season, and discover what happens for all those who have to fight for the respect that everyone else is given without question.