The Beginning of the End: N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season

Here we are in the last month of 2018 and I am running out of time to finish my resolution project! I come to you, friends, with the first of The Broken Earth trilogy because these books are rough reads and I needed a pick me up in the middle. This book has already been reviewed by Lane Robins, and you can read her review here. This post will have more to do with my individual reaction while reading it, as Lane and I had different experiences.

The Fifth Season (2015)

Written by: N.K. Jemisin
Genre: Fantasy
Pages: 498 (trade paperback)
Series: Book One of The Broken Earth
Publisher: Orbit

The premise:

This is the way the world ends…for the last time.

A season of endings has begun.

It starts with the great red rift across the heart of the world’s sole continent, spewing ash that blots out the sun.

It starts with death, with a murdered son and a missing daughter.

It starts with betrayal, and long dormant wounds rising up to fester.

This is the Stillness, a land long familiar with catastrophe, where the power of the earth is wielded as a weapon. And where there is no mercy.

Listen, as much as I’d love to, I don’t trust myself not to spoil this story in this review, so you’ve been warned.

Discussion:

So let’s start with the fact that this premise does basically nothing to explain what’s going on, which is kind of like starting an N.K. Jemisin book, a process for which there are zero training wheels. Jemisin likes to start her books in media res and you either trust that process or you don’t. It’s not for everyone, for sure. There are few explanations for anything, and you have to pick up so, so much just via context clues and random tidbits that all work together to paint the larger picture. Her books are work.

I think I’ve had this paragraph in every single review so far this year, but it keeps being true, so I’ll keep saying it.

This is one story told in three parts but instead of telling part one, part two, and then part three, the chapters are woven together. And these stories are brutal in their individual ways. Damaya is a child of raw power-in this story they’re called orogenes and have control over stone and earth-who in fear is sold by her family to the Fulcrum, an organization who gathers orogene children and trains them to control their power. Syenite is a young women in the Fulcrum, 4th level out of 10, who is called to a remote part of the world to clear a harbor of coral. And Essun is an older woman whose story begins with the death of her son at the hands of her husband because of the power the child had been hiding from his father.

All of these stories are brutal in their own ways, for reasons I don’t particularly want to spoil. Some of them, Essun’s for instance, should be sort of obvious just from that brief description. Syenite’s starts with a really brutal description of a child strapped into a node maintenance station and ends with, well, let’s just say it ends in tragedy. She survives though, which is somehow worse. Just truly brutal but, like, in a way that I enjoy?

It’s a story about the end of the world, which I knew going in, but Jemisin continues to surprise me with where she takes her stories. The interesting thing about this society is that these “fifth seasons” where the world breaks apart and reshapes have happened so frequently that the seasons have names. Orogenes are trained up in particular to help prevent them from happening, to calm the tectonic plates.

This part from the prologue gave me goosebumps:

This is what you must remember: the ending of one story is just the beginning of another. This has happened before, after all. People die. Old orders pass. New societies are born. When we say “the world has ended,” it’s usually a lie, because the planet is just fine.

But this is the way the world ends.

This is the way the world ends.

This is the way the world ends.

For the last time. (Page 14)

What a way to start this story, you get such a visceral picture of where this is going, and it’s no place happy. I was continually blown away by the construction of the story, by the way Jemisin not only shapes her narrative and her characters, but also the sentences on the page. She’s a masterful storyteller and I’m just happy to be alive at the same time she is.

In conclusion: I can’t recommend reading her enough, because every book has been completely worth it, even the Dreamblood duology, which everyone told me was her weakest link.