The Stone Sky (2017)
Written by: N K Jemisin
Genre: Fantasy
Pages: 464 (Trade Paperback)
Series: The Broken Earth, Book 3
Publisher: Orbit
Why I Chose It: So this was a no-brainer. I was absolutely going to read this book after I’d read the first two. I bought it and it sat on my shelf, waiting for the right time to read it. (It’s the curse of highly-anticipated books — I want there to be candlelight and soft breezes and maybe a delicious dessert to eat alongside; the highly anticipated books demand wooing… but hey, life is chaos and the perfect time took a while to come along.)
But that perfect time is now, since it’s been nominated (just like the previous two) for the Nebula Award, as well as the Hugo, and it’s award season!
The Premise:
The Moon will soon return. Whether this heralds the destruction of humankind or something worse will depend on two women.
Essun has inherited the power of Alabaster Tenring. With it, she hopes to find her daughter Nassun and forge a world in which every orogene child can grow up safe.
For Nassun, her mother’s mastery of the Obelisk Gate comes too late. She has seen the evil of the world, and accepted what her mother will not admit: that sometimes what is corrupt cannot be cleansed, only destroyed.
THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS… FOR THE LAST TIME.
SPOILERS BELOW
Discussion: This has been a weird series for me. The world-building and characterization is top-notch and riveting. The plot goal is literally world-changing/ending. Nearly every single event in these books is life and death, and also an exploration of humanity’s inhumanity/mercy.
But in some ways, it’s been a rocky road. (No pun intended!)
The Fifth Season annoyed me in one significant way because I was really anticipating the meeting of these three interesting women, only to realize oh, wait, they’re the same woman at different times in her life. I felt weirdly cheated.
The Obelisk Gate was a much better fit for me, because Essun interacted with multiple people — many of them other women (yay!) — and learned vast and fascinating things about the world. The story wasn’t so honed in on her losses the way the first book inevitably was, as she moved from life to life — from Damaya to Syenite to Essun.
And the third…
I have to admit, while I expected to be blown away by The Stone Sky, to be riveted to the pages, there were vast swaths of it that disappointed.
The biggest flaw is I felt like the characters each took turns marking time waiting for the plot to come back around to them.
Essun is part of a comm-wide march to Rennanis in the hopes of shepherding the remnants of the Castrima comm to a new home, and it’s dangerous, and it’s hard, and people are dying in droves. But… it didn’t seem to have stakes for her, personally. She was always planning to leave them to hunt down her daughter. She’s not really learning anything new, either, other than how the stone-eaters appetites work.
So in the beginning of the book, I was more drawn into Nassun’s quest — to get to the Corepoint, to flee the Antarctic comm where she became a killer, and to put a stop to the world’s suffering, even if that means ending the world. Her quest and her relationship with Schaffa are great; she gets to learn so much about the history of her world by exploring dead civ ruins. However, I had a really hard time believing a ten-year-old could make and sustain a plan that involved destroying the whole world. A super powerful child in a temper? Sure, I’d buy that. But ending the world as a deliberate, multiple month-long plan? I had doubts. Then, once she gets to the Corepoint, her plot… stops for a while. She hangs out for months, doing story busywork — taking care of Schaffa, reading old journals, and eking a living out among stone-eaters.
I get it, I do. The two characters reached either side of their world and had to reunite at a third site for a fate-of-the-world confrontation. And magic can only take them so far. It still meant that chunks of the book felt like they dragged.
But we got a third POV here; Hoa’s narrative of his life. And I really wanted to like it, and I did like it — face it, Jemisin can not write a dull sentence and I would read her lists of world-building very happily. I also wasn’t sure why it was needed. Hoa is definitely the narrative thread binding this book together, but really, all the things he showed historically — how the Shattering happened, how the orogenes came about, who the Guardians are — were already implied pretty darn clearly. So I felt like I was learning details, but not anything really new. And thematically?
Thematically, these can be very depressing books. As far as I can tell, the theme goes something like “people are greedy for power and also determined to keep that power by oppressing others, even if working together would be a better idea and that probably can’t be eradicated even if we try.” I do love that they decide to try though, that even if they can’t change everything for the better, that the attempt is worth it.
So I’ve already intuited that theme through the first two books, and here, we have Hoa, telling his story, which is pretty much the same old, same old — man’s inhumanity to man, man’s insatiable appetite for power.
Yet, Hoa’s plot narrative is really what holds this book together, and it smooths over a lot of the gaps.
Nassun and Essun’s long-anticipated clash is… very short. There’s no room or time for the airing of grievances, no time actually for any significant communication. That bugged me, since both of these characters were driven by each other in one way or another, and because we’d spent the majority of three books wondering how they would react when they met again.
The ending wrapped up fast, too fast, I’d argue. Essun gets a complete story arc, but Nassun vanishes off the page, no longer of interest. We don’t get to see the earth calming; we don’t get Schaffa’s reaction to Nassun’s attempt to end the world. We don’t get to see a lot of things that I wanted to see, and I begrudged a bunch of the slower scenes as if they’d taken away the pieces of the denouement I wanted most.
There’s a lot that happens in this book and I just wondered why some of it was there because it changed nothing. As a spoiler-ridden example, Essun takes Lerna as her lover and gets pregnant. He dies, she’s vaguely distressed but has more on her mind, and when she makes the decision to save her “last child,” she’s obviously making the decision to let go of the fetus, but… it’s not even a blip on the page. I’m not saying she should have angsted over it for paragraphs and pages; live daughter who you believe you’ve wronged and can save from a deadly fate vs. the very beginnings of pregnancy? No contest who you save. But I felt like a single thought about the would-be baby should have crossed her mind. One of my friends, when I mentioned it to her, said, “Oh, I forgot she’d even been pregnant.”
All this criticism makes it sound like I didn’t like the book, when I did enjoy it. If I were rating in five stars, this would be a solid 3.5 — which means, in my own vernacular of stars — that I would and will recommend it to other readers and will undoubtedly read it again myself.
The Stone Sky, even more than the other two, feels connected to history and mythos and storytelling as a form of humanity. Hoa’s story is really the heart of this book; my nitpicks about it aside, it’s a glorious little slice of appalling history and grandiose magic gone horribly awry because people are terrible in many ways.
I also adored a random side-character, new to this book: Danel. Jemisin brings her to vivid life in really very few scenes.
I really rooted for The Fifth Season to win awards, because the world-building and the characterization was so strong. And I flat-out loved The Obelisk Gate. The Stone Sky is a reasonably satisfying conclusion to this tale, so it’s completely worth reading. Not least because Jemisin gives us, at the end of three books, an amazingly valid reason to have used second person for all three books. Excellent!
In Conclusion: If you’ve read the first two, you’ll read this, and you’ll probably like it well enough. If you’ve read it and think I’m crazy-wrong, come tell me why. I’m willing to be convinced. Will it win the Nebula Award? Should it win? I feel like The Stone Sky is one of the strongest contenders, and I’ve read four of the seven, and heard great things about the other three. But in the end, I’m just not sure.
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