Book Review: The Fifth Season

Picking up N.K. Jemisin's 2015 novel The Fifth Season last month for a book club read, I wasn't really sure what to expect. My rule of thumb when it comes to books I've decided ahead of time to read is to entirely ignore the back cover and end pages, basically anything that might tell me what the book is about, as I figure that's simply advertising for a book I've already agreed to read.

What I knew about the book going in was:

1) It had won the 2016 Hugo for best novel - so I was looking at Science Fiction
2) My friend Mike (who has himself read his way through most of the Hugo winners since they began in 1953) picked it

So I start this book about a woman called Essun and the very first thing I notice is that the book is written in second person - the first chapter begins:

You are she. She is You. You are Essun. Remember? The woman whose son is dead.

You're an orogene who's been living in the little nothing town of Tirimo for ten years. Only three people here know what you are, and two of them you gave birth to.

Well. One left who knows, now.

For me, this immediately pulled me into the narrative, starting with this woman's tragedy and over time finding the stories of two other women, Daraya, a young child taken from her home and Syenite,an orogene paired with a curmudgeon named Alabaster for further training and breeding.

The story was often a hard read, and the broken Earth described by Jemisin was a strange and fascinating world for me to explore. In the end I liked the book enough to follow up with the sequel The Obelisk Gate within a few weeks, and I've got the final novel in the trilogy The Stone Sky on hold at my local library.

A really facinating read, and one that I would definitely recommend checking out.