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3.5/5
Non-Fiction
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Rating: 3.5/5
Pages: 391
Started: 24 March 2024
Finished: 26 March 2024
Summary:
Though Essun's search for her kidnapped daughter Nassun hasn't ended, it has been interrupted. Not only does the underground, Orogene-run comm that she's ended up in need her help for their continued survival, but so does Alabaster. He is dying, and every time he uses his power, more of his physical body crumbles to stone, but he also knows how to stop the Seasons wracking the earth, for good, and he's determined to teach Essun before it's too late.
Nassun watched her father kill her brother, and take her, so she knows she can't trust him. She's an orogene, and he may love her, but she knows he hates her for it. When they arrive at a comm advertised to cure roggas of their powers, she instead discovers a community of orogenes and guardians who help her to develop her power into something that could make or break the future of the earth.
Thoughts:
This book is a brilliant work of literature, and also I do not feel particularly connected to any of the characters or particularly invested in the plot. The writing is incredible; the use of different styles of narration is so impressive, and I love Jemisin's language with parentheses and elipses and incomplete sentences. She writes like poetry, with every word and narrative choice having an impact, and it's really beautiful. The book certainly did not shy away from violence, but although it was horrifying at points, it was described with the same poetic impact as other events were.
The characters were also fascinating. I especially loved Hoa, the mysterious stone being, and I'm glad Schaffa the Guardian returned too, since he was so interesting in the first book. That being said, I really just did not feel connected to any of them at all, and I did not feel involved in the story in the slightest. It felt more like reading literature than reading a novel. That's not necessarily a bad thing, though. The writing and world-building were very complex, quite hard to follow at points, so the book feels as if it were written more like an intellectual literary fantasy than a for-fun book, and that is okay. I don't know when I'm going to read the third book in the series, since I do not feel overly invested in the characters or plot, but hopefully I will at some point because Jemisin's writing is so beautiful.