Review: The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

I am very, very far from the first person to have been completely floored by this novel, and I assume I am even farther from the last.

So much of this novel is so unexpected in so many wildly different ways. N.K. Jemisin does a beautiful job of throwing you into a world you completely do not understand and makes you turn page after page until you feel deeply rooted in this world. Then you move on to being able to put together pieces of the world and the plot (in maybe the most satisfying way I have ever read). It is just an incredibly wonderful book that is structured so cleverly.

The Fifth Season follows Essun, Damaya, and Syenite. Essun, a secret orogene, the world's magic users, must hunt down her husband, who has murdered one of their children and kidnapped the other, Damaya has been forcibly separated from her family and taken to a school for orogene's, and Syenite is a trained orogene who wants to continue her rise through the ranks. Saying anything more would ruin the journey of coming to understand this world and characters. Figuring out the power of this world and who holds it is a delightful puzzle.

I have had this book on my radar for quite some time; I have been hoarding N.K. Jemisin books for years (I have The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and The City We Became just waiting for me to finish this series), but obviously, this being the series she won three consecutive Hugo's for makes it a stand out. I probably first became aware of this book because I love second person and this book has an entire POV that is in second person. I took the leap to actually read it because a discord I am in chose this book as our group read this month. I am so excited to have started my N.K. Jemisin journey, I hope to have read all her books before the year ends.

The worldbuilding in this book is astonishing. This world is feral and cruel and huge and learning to orient yourself in it is absolutely a delightful experience. I feel like a broken record just saying or and over how much I adore this book. You are just really able to dive into different aspects of this world with the different characters and their very different lives. We get to see so much of this world, and fitting it all together was a delightful experience. This is the kind of book that I am so sad I only get to experience for the first time once.

I loved the characters of this world. The people are all so well thought out, and Jemisin has really built an incredibly broad and real-world full of different people with their own desires and agendas. The characters really served to make the emotional core of the story very strong. I felt so many deep emotions while reading this book. There is one scene in particular where I felt disgust and sadness so viscerally that I was surprised it came from this book alone. Jemisin is deft with her manipulation of your emotions. I especially loved the balance of surprises with giving the reader the clues to figure it out for themselves. I got to feel shocked and intelligent in such a lovely balance.

I gave this book 5 stars on Goodreads and The StoryGraph. I clearly recommend this book. If you are an SSF reader who hasn't picked up this series yet, you really should get here asap. This is adult fantasy, and the complexity and content match that, just as a heads up for any younger folks. I would recommend this book especially to folks who love books with cool structures, who want to go on an epic journey, and who want a rich, fleshed-out world.