2018 read #23: The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin.

The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin
468 pages
Published 2015
Read from November 6 to November 21
Rating: 3 out of 5 (see edit below)

As with other books that open N. K. Jemisin series, the beginning of The Fifth Season is overstuffed with worldbuilding, throwing the reader in at the deep end and overwhelming them with fantasy terminology and all the strange rules for how things work in this setting. I don't know whether The Fifth Season was more confusing than usual or if my attention span continues not to be what it used to be, but I had a hard time parsing enough about what was going on to care all that much about the characters or their end-of-the-world predicament, at least in the early going. Once the story stabilized and I got my bearings, the story itself became more grim and "shocking" than I would like, featuring murdered children and lobotomized children and children murdered so that they wouldn't be lobotomized.

(Edit: I happened to reread this review in 2023. I don't usually go back and edit my reviews, but I need to state for the record that the above paragraph demonstrates spectacularly bad reading comprehension on the part of my 2018 self. The shocking cruelty is one of the points of the book. As my privileged ass would only understand much later, this series was in large part an allegory for how the stolen labor and lives of enslaved African people was used to build and sustain the United States and the rest of the colonizing world. I want to go back and reread these books sometime. As it is, I'm guessing this book deserved something closer to 4 out of 5, had I actually understood Jemisin's point here.)

That said, it's a Jemisin novel, and for the most part, I enjoyed it. She builds fascinating settings, and her exploration of human (and not-quite-human) suffering and injustice in the face of environmental catastrophe is all too relevant.