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The Fifth Season
Author: N.K. Jemisin
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.
I had known about N.K.
Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms for quite some time except I just
couldn’t bring myself to read it. I don’t know why I decided to read her newest
book, The Fifth Season, though I’m glad I did. I’m not a fan of tragedies, and
this book is a great big mass of tragedy, so much so that I wonder if there
will ever be a happily ever after, but oh well, it’s still interesting. The
book simultaneously traverses across three timelines. In the beginning you
think that these three are different people, but later realise that they are, all
three of them, the same person at different ages.
I won’t say that I really like
her characters (sometimes I do), they’re sort of hard to connect with. They’re
also somewhat distant though I do sympathise with them. They have, from the
beginning of their lives, been brutalized emotionally, manipulated and
controlled. The Orogenes, people who can control how the plates of the earth
shift, creating or stopping earthquakes, are despised and feared. The main
character, who we first know only as Essun is an Orogene. She comes home to
find her son beaten to death by her husband and her daughter missing along with
the husband. This is her journey.
The novel is not exactly
beautiful, more like brutal and painful, like their world itself but I will
also say that never once, was it ever boring.