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3.5/5
Non-Fiction
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Read with Elise & Chesney
Rating: 4/5
Pages: 512
Started: 21 December 2024
Finished: 1 March 2024
Summary:
A mother setting out to find her children and take revenge on her husband who took them from her. A girl snatched from her home for brutal training because of her power to manipulate the volatile earth already in flux thanks to the Seasons that periodically wrack it and wreck the human civilization atop it. A woman on a mission to fix far-off quakes, accompanied by the powerful man she's been asked to have a child with. And another Fifth Season, another wrecking earthquake, another set of world-ending calamities, is on its way.
Thoughts:
What a cool book. I hadn't read a story that had intense world-building but was also gloriously immersive in a long time, but this was definitely both of those things. The writing was beautiful, the characters were complex and fascinating, and every minute I was reading this book, I was desperate to find out more: more about the world, more about who each character was, more about how everything would come together. NK Jemison is wildly talented in balancing complex dystopia and world-building with engaging characters and plot. I did accidentally predict most of the plot twists, especially the relationship between the three narrators (SPOILER: they're all the same person), but it was a cool twist anyway, and it was very impressive that the three characters felt so distinct and interesting in their own right, and then also made perfect sense as three parts of the same person (like the three faced goddess, except the three iterations of Syenite are closer to maiden, warrior, and mother).
It was interesting to read a contemporary adult fantasy novel, since most of the fantasy I've read has been older (The Lord of the Rings), or young adult (Graceling, for example) or new adult (like the Sarah J. Maas books). But this book is definitely the start of my foray into more fantasy, and I'm excited to keep reading the series soon.