Review: The Fifth Season

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am obsessed with The Fifth Season. It was all I could talk about for weeks after reading it and its sequel, The Obelisk Gate. It’s wholly original while still echoing the best of the genre - it has the scope and feel of Game of Thrones paired with completely reinvented genre trappings. The plot is the kind you can’t put down, the characters are achingly real, and the story is so neatly, tightly structured that it feels like a beautiful machine. Plus, it’s rare that an audiobook is so excellent that it elevates the source material when the source material is so good in itself. I was especially impressed because I was slightly underwhelmed by Jemisin’s Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. I’m so thankful I gave her another try!

But Jemisin’s work is powerful above and beyond her technical skill and a good story. This is a powerful narrative about racism and institutionalized slavery. The echoes of America’s history are clearly visible, here, but she did not simply lift the same dynamics and social structures from that history and place them in a new world. Instead, this is a story that feels very much like it organically grew out of its theme, which is the tension between the perception and the reality of black Americans’ role in American society. She took that tension, specifically, and used it as a seed of a new story planted in the soil of a fictional world and this is the story that grew. Just as the Confederate South insisted that black slaves were less than human and fully disposable yet went to war so they could keep those slaves because their way of life could not survive without them, the orogens are despised and reviled but literally necessary to keep the Stillness from falling apart. Even the oxymoronic name Stillness echoes back to early America - the United States were no such thing (and still are not today). And just as black Americans still could hold so much more power in the country if institutional blocks on their power were removed, the orogens must be carefully monitored by an institution that breaks the most powerful of them and forces them to be part of the system. The orogens who survive must keep deciding that the Stillness is worth saving so the institution has to teach them to believe that they are inhuman and worthless. The parallels are deeply woven into the story and fairly visible from my vantage point now, having finished the first two books, but I also didn’t feel at any point that Jemisin was preaching or writing some kind of morality play. I think that’s partly due to the complexity of the role of the orogens in their society and how the impact of the institutional oppression on the individual characters is unpacked steadily throughout the story, not all at once. Of course, the rest of the work is done by Jemisin’s masterful writing.

The icing on the cake, for me, is the recurring theme of Father Earth. In a world where the very ground threatens the survival of the species, the earth cannot be seen as something nurturing, and I think Jemisin is doing something deeply clever by re-gendering the Earth. I audibly gasped when the narrator pointed out ‘there is something absent from the story - notice that people do not look up at the sky.’ (A paraphrase, not a quote! The actual line is about a thousand times better.)

I keep saying that “oh but the BEST thing about this book is…’ because as each piece of the book pops back into my mind I’m continually surprised and pleased by how well they work. The magic system (which I suspect might actually end up being science) is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. It’s power over kinetic energy, heat, the movement of molecules and earth. The smallest and the biggest power. I think it’s appropriate for an allegory for black Americans, too - it’s a power that is largely unseeable despite its massive force. It’s also linked intimately with re-shaping the very world.

Overall, this is one of the best pieces of fiction I have read in a long time and I am oh so eager to get my hands on the third volume. Read this! It earned both its Hugos!


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Review: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms came recommended to me by many different people. I'd heard so much about Jemisin's work, and had picked up her books to browse through them several times at the library. Honestly, I had my doubts when reading those first few pages, but I soldiered on and checked it out.

I should have listened to my gut on this one. The beginning of the novel had me intrigued - it's not an original set up (young person who is connected to the throne but unlikely to inherit suddenly is named the heir!), but the world is sufficiently complex on the surface that I wanted to find out more. Unfortunately, that complexity is almost deliberately induced confusion to make you think that there is more to the story.

Yeine, granddaughter of the king? emperor? dictator? unspecified ruler of the kingdom (is it one of the hundred thousand? I'm not sure, because while they connect the titular phrase to a historical event, it seems like the historical hundred thousand kingdoms would not be the same as the current ones), is summoned by her grandfather to court, where she is named one of his three heirs. Things escalate from there, with seemingly arbitrarily. For example, more than halfway through the book, we discover that one person (usually a low-ranking member of the family) is always sacrificed at the coronation ceremony - something no one has seen fit to tell one of the people (Yeine) attending the coronation, even though it would make a lot of sense since everyone wants her dead and actually expects her to be the sacrifice. We're also told, however, that the person who is sacrificed should be emotionally close to the one being crowned, which contradicts what was said earlier about the low-ranking family members (and Yeine isn't close, or low-ranking). So, not sure why that should make sense.

Yeine also makes friends with a lot of gods, whose hierarchy and systematic control are explained, but still fail to feel realistic. Her torrid affair with the god of chaos reads like something out of a horny teenager's journal, and it's especially weird because there are at least two moments where we're supposed to feel a lot of climactic tension because she's sleeping with him!! and if she sleeps with him she will probably die!! But... there are two of these moments, and she survives the first, so I'm not sure why the second is built up so much.

That problem is persistent throughout the book - the same beats are hit multiple times, the same important moments recurring in a barely different form or emotional arcs being reinscribed - and it's probably the book's fatal flaw. Otherwise, it's just a very typical coming-of-age fantasy novel from start to finish. With that flaw, though, it's a very boring coming-of-age fantasy novel that feels overdone both historically and even within the story itself.

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