In the land of the Stillness, natural disasters have become a part of life. The land goes through cycles of extreme weather, where the earth is torn apart and the land is filled with ash and dust.
By Harleen Bawa
The Fifth Season has arrived, and with it comes chaos. The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin is the first book in the Broken Earth trilogy, a record-breaking series, with each book winning the Hugo Award for Best Novel three years in a row, something no author has ever achieved before.
The book focuses on Essun, a young woman who goes on the run after her husband murdered her son and kidnapped her daughter. But this world is filled with disatesr and people willing to turn on the orgenes–those with the power to control the Earth–and Essun must go
The name of the land, the Stillness, is intentionally ironic, because the geography is constantly undergoing an apocalypse every so often. This instability has given birth to a whole new, volatile reality, with a caste system and a world where science has been mixed with magic, and where the moon has been cast off.
N.K. Jemisin is noted for building complex worlds like this one in series like the award-winning Inheritance Trilogy or the Dreamblood Duology. As Essun searches for her daughter, the story becomes more than that as a new tragedy threatens the entire planet. Whatever kind of disaster bears upon the Stillness is called a Season, and the next one threatens to be devastating in the way the Earth has never seen before. There is a lot of ambiguity in this book, especially with Syen and Damaya, characters of other castes whose stories overlap with Essun’s in ways that highlight the themes of power and oppression in the Stillness.
The Fifth Season is not straightforward or easy to understand, but it is very emotional and that carries the story forward through this complicated setting, and it is clear that the first book sets the foundation for the rest of the series.
Each point of view carries a different strength and a different secret that all connects to the main plot in a way that is clever and unexpected, and it can also be used as a metaphor for geography and society. What Jemisin writes early on is connected throughout the entire plot, and it foreshadows the ending for the book and the beginning of the next one.
In the end, the Stillness and The Fifth Season are about more than geological upheaval and political foreshadowing–it is about the affects the world has on each and every one of us, and how the choices we make shape our lives in more ways than we know.
“This is what you must remember: the ending of one story is just the beginning of another,” Jemisin writes in The Fifth Season, showing that every character contains their own world within themselves.
The Fifth Season is the first book in the Broken Earth Trilogy, followed by The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky. N.K. Jemisin is also the author of The Inheritance Trilogy, the Dreamblood Duology, and the Great Cities Duology.
