In the Stillness, apocalypse-level natural disasters occur often enough that there’s an entire name for it: the Fifth Season, or just the Season, that communities prepare for sometimes for hundreds of years. Essun is a woman caught in the middle of all this — a woman with the magic that can be used to stop or at least soften these disasters — searching for her daughter after her husband brutally murders their son and abducts her.
I’m not sure what I expected when I started reading The Fifth Season, but regardless of what it was, I couldn’t possibly have expected what I found. The summary of the book sounded pretty dreadfully dark, but from the first page, the writing style is funny and engaging, even as it addresses some truly horrifying events.
And, unlike other science fiction I’ve read, the novel starts out focusing on a mother’s journey to find her daughter — and Essun, the novel’s protagonist, is defined by more than just her motherhood.
Essun was probably my favorite part of The Fifth Season, despite all the politics and colonialism and all the other great stuff I love. Her personality is rich, despite her initial shock when she discovers her son’s body in the opening of the book, and as her shock wanes through the course of the story, she gets funnier and her personality shines through even more.
Another thing I loved about the book was its very frank discussion of how groups with social and political power treat people without social and political power. Orogenes have immense magical power that can be used to slow or sometimes even halt natural disasters, but the deep fear ordinary people have of that power leads to ostracizing and fear.
I’m a huge fan of the political, so I found the power dichotomy in The Fifth Season very compelling. Although it’s a totally different genre and with a totally different theme — the protagonist is an actual messiah and the white savior complex is SO REAL — Dune was the first book that came to mind when I finished The Fifth Season.
Admittedly, part of it was that The Fifth Season‘s less political survival-of-humanity themes reminded me of the same survival themes in Dune, which pits humans against a desert planet almost devoid of water rather than against a world filled with impending apocalypse. The Fifth Season might be better compared to the anime Attack on Titan (Shingeki no Kyojin), which focuses on the survival of humanity in the face of apocalypse-level events in the form of giant humanoid monsters. While both stories frame their events in a setting of world-scale apocalypse, they’re ultimately about human journeys, which ends up having the general effect of getting punched in the gut by a book.
Another book The Fifth Season reminded me of was Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death, mainly because the protagonist is a woman with great supernatural abilities in the face of a political hotbed who lives in a culture where her abilities aren’t respected, but feared. (I’d add a few more things, but spoilers.)
Author N. K. Jemisin has a Goodreads bibliography that makes the sci-fi reader in me want to cry rich tears of happiness. Her work’s been featured in a number of anthologies — like The Mammoth Book of Steampunk, After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia, and Epic: Legends of Fantasy, and her most recent novels were in the Inheritance trilogy, which you can read now as a single volume.
One thing that may trip up readers is the use of second-person perspective in Essun’s chapters. I’ve only read a few second-person perspective books overall, and usually I find it very distracting: it’s an uncommon writing style and rarely done adequately.
However, I’d argue that if you’re going to read a book from the second-person perspective, read it when Jemisin writes it. She eases the reader into Essun’s head easily and, as readers eventually discover, with purpose.
Overall, the book reads as if Frank Herbert’s Dune and Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death had a baby that was a lot funnier than they were. Essun’s second-person perspective took some time to get acclimated to, but Jemisin introduces the reader to the perspective so easily and with such an enchanting style that you can’t help wanting to read more.
The Fifth Season is a perfect fantasy read for lovers of science fiction. As a fan of both books I mentioned above — and as someone who just isn’t that into fantasy most of the time — The Fifth Season marks the start of a promising trilogy with one of the most wonderfully balanced fantasy voices I’ve ever read. Hugely recommended for anyone who loves ethics and civil rights in speculative fiction.
5 out of 5 stars
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Feliza Casano edits and writes for all sections of the site. In her approximate 2.3 hours of free time each month, she loves watching anime, reading science fiction, and working on her novels-in-progress. Keep up with her antics at felizacasano.com and follow her on Twitter @FelizaCasano.
