The Stone Sky by N. K. Jemisin
400 pages
Published 2017
Read from March 27 to May 23
Rating: 3 out of 5
As soon as I finished The Obelisk Gate, the second book in Jemisin's Broken Earth Trilogy, I wrote in my review, "I'm excited to complete the trilogy." I had read Obelisk Gate swiftly, finishing it at a pace reminiscent of how I used to read books before events we all know and deplore. The same day I posted Obelisk's review, I started reading The Stone Sky. But something was different, and the final book of the trilogy just didn't sustain my interest the way the middle volume had done.
I think the difference was something as simple as a couple new viewpoint characters. I grew to enjoy and appreciate the several-millennia-back flashbacks to Houwha/Hoa's past, but at first those chapters threw me out of the flow of the books. It's one thing to introduce a new viewpoint and more backstory in the middle of a trilogy; in the last book, though, it feels like the story wasn't quite working out as intended and the plot needed some belated course-correction, even if that isn't the case. The addition of Nassun's perspective felt more organic to the narrative, bringing with it—spoilers!—the perspective of systematic oppression and violence against a minority group can lead to the temptation to just wipe everything away, perhaps by slamming the Moon into the Earth. But as a reader, I can't say that Nassun's chapters were my favorites.
All that aside, I did enjoy this book, and I appreciated how the different story threads and perspectives all came together in the end. The odd narrative structure that had been such a prominent feature since the very beginning of the trilogy in The Fifth Season finally clicked into place—we finally know why the narrator was telling Essun her own story, and it fit in perfectly with everything we knew.
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