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Sep. 24th, 2016 01:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsSequel Season continues with The Obelisk Gate, the follow-up to N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season, in which the world ended and everything was terrible but in extremely interesting and engaging ways!
In The Obelisk Gate, the world continues to end, and things continue to be terrible, but there is a glimmer of hope! Essun, Our Heroine, has found a community where people don't want to (immediately) kill her, and within that community is an old friend (who is admittedly dying), and within that old friend is (possibly) the knowledge that might (maybe) save the world from several thousand years of geological winter and the inevitable destruction of humanity, if he can ever manage to impart it in a straight sentence before he turns completely into stone and is consumed by his new stone eater bestie.
In the meantime, Essun's lost eleven-year-old daughter Nassun is off on her own adventures! ... with a dad who killed her little brother and still might do the same to her if he's not convinced that she's 'curable'; a shiny new father figure who has done many terrible things and will most likely do more terrible things and loves Nassun very, very much; and a plot arc that seems likely to place her in direct and potentially world-destroying collision with her mother (who still wants more than anything to find her daughter, despite the fact that Nassun has no interest in having anything further to do with her) in Book Three.
The Fifth Season was a grim book. This book is as dark, or darker. It's engaging very hard with cycles of abuse and the way that oppression facilitates those cycles, both on the overarching and the extremely personal scales. Also, Essun and Nassun between them wipe out at least three ENTIRE CITIES in this book alone. Maybe four? I might be losing count. (And yet still neither of them is actually winning the body count Olympics! Thanks, Alabaster.)
But, you know, as of this book I do not, in fact, actually feel like the entire series is likely to end with rocks falling and everyone dying, which is something! (A rock certainly seems destined to fall and a lot of people will most likely die -- at this point, Essun is going at a steady rate of two cities destroyed per book and I expect that to be maintained at BARE MINIMUM -- but probably not everybody!)
In The Obelisk Gate, the world continues to end, and things continue to be terrible, but there is a glimmer of hope! Essun, Our Heroine, has found a community where people don't want to (immediately) kill her, and within that community is an old friend (who is admittedly dying), and within that old friend is (possibly) the knowledge that might (maybe) save the world from several thousand years of geological winter and the inevitable destruction of humanity, if he can ever manage to impart it in a straight sentence before he turns completely into stone and is consumed by his new stone eater bestie.
In the meantime, Essun's lost eleven-year-old daughter Nassun is off on her own adventures! ... with a dad who killed her little brother and still might do the same to her if he's not convinced that she's 'curable'; a shiny new father figure who has done many terrible things and will most likely do more terrible things and loves Nassun very, very much; and a plot arc that seems likely to place her in direct and potentially world-destroying collision with her mother (who still wants more than anything to find her daughter, despite the fact that Nassun has no interest in having anything further to do with her) in Book Three.
The Fifth Season was a grim book. This book is as dark, or darker. It's engaging very hard with cycles of abuse and the way that oppression facilitates those cycles, both on the overarching and the extremely personal scales. Also, Essun and Nassun between them wipe out at least three ENTIRE CITIES in this book alone. Maybe four? I might be losing count. (And yet still neither of them is actually winning the body count Olympics! Thanks, Alabaster.)
But, you know, as of this book I do not, in fact, actually feel like the entire series is likely to end with rocks falling and everyone dying, which is something! (A rock certainly seems destined to fall and a lot of people will most likely die -- at this point, Essun is going at a steady rate of two cities destroyed per book and I expect that to be maintained at BARE MINIMUM -- but probably not everybody!)
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Date: 2016-09-24 08:26 pm (UTC)