Book completed

[eve_prime]

The Fifth Season, by N.K. Jemisin. Broken Earth #1. My understanding of this story before I began was that it’s a world with magic, but the magic-using people are the ones who are oppressed. Quite so. We follow three stories set in a world with orogeny, a form of magic that involves shaping and managing the rock of the land itself. Damaya is a young girl whose magical talent has been identified, so she’s bonded with a Guardian and taken away for training. Syen is a young woman who has completed her training and is sent on assignment to help a distant community. And Essun is a mother who’s been hiding her magical talent, but her young child had apparently manifested his magic in front of his father, who then murdered him for it and fled with their older child. It’s a brutal place, and the author writes with sensitivity about what it’s like to live this way. Another factor that seems to influence the magic is the fleet of strange obelisks up in the atmosphere, and we’ll surely learn more about them in the rest of the trilogy. I can see why each of the three books in the trilogy won the Hugo Award – it’s engaging and extremely interesting.

Comments

[claidheamhmor]

I've heard so much about N. K. Jemisin, I really must read her books.

[eve_prime]

She's found some very interesting ways to write about social justice in this series. It's good, too, that she's signaling that bad things will happen so it's not such a shock when it does. It's definitely not an upbeat story, though.