The Fifth Season

Picked this up between codes, mostly, the kind of reading where you close the book not knowing if you’ll be back in six minutes or six hours. This one survived that, barely, because the second-person sections keep hitting you back into the room every time you pick it back up. You is Essun, you just found your son beaten to death by his own father, and the book won’t let you look away from that by hiding behind “she.” I resisted it for the first chapter, thought it was a gimmick, then it wasn’t.

Three women, three timelines, and I won’t pretend I clocked the trick before it landed, though plenty of people online say they saw it coming. Didn’t matter. The node maintainers are the detail that actually wrecked me, orogene children lobotomized and wired into machines to keep the ground quiet, mentioned almost in passing, and it’s colder than anything else in the book precisely because the world has normalized it into infrastructure. That’s Jemisin’s whole move here, horror filed as bureaucracy.

Jija killing his own son opens the book and I kept waiting for the narrative to soften that, it never does, it just makes you carry it in second person the whole way through. Somebody complained the audiobook narrator struggled to voice Innon convincingly, forced is the word used, which tracks, he’s a hard character to land, all warmth with an edge under it.

Rated five, dinged nothing. Rocks, grief, and a magic system that runs on suppressed rage, that’s not a combination I expected to want more of. I do.