Category Archives: Fantasy

Book Reviews, Fantasy, Novella

Book Review: Speak Easy by Catherynne M. Valente

Leave a comment

Speak Easy is every bit as weird and wonderful as I could hope for or expect of a new novella by Catherynne M. Valente. As is characteristic of the author’s work, Speak Easy is a lush tapestry of beautiful prose, full of cunning wordplay, richly detailed descriptions, and a cast of eccentric characters.

My favorite thing about any Cat Valente book is the sense of space she achieves in every world she creates. The hotel Artemisia is no different. Reading Speak Easy is like walking into the hotel and taking a guided tour with someone who has lived there their entire life. They know all its nooks and crannies, but there’s really no end to the secrets of the place. Every page of this book is full of life and color and drama, and Valente seems to almost effortlessly weave a picture of a vibrantly wonderful world.

Speak Easy is being sold as a retelling of The Twelve Dancing Princesses, but you may not see it unless you know the original fairy tale very well. Valente is a shrewd scholar of fairytales and mythology of all kinds, and she has a keen talent for adding her own embellishments and twists. Her deep love, appreciation, and understanding of the form shines from every single page.

At the same time, though, there’s an awful lot packed into this slim little story. It’s not just an old fairytale; it’s also A Midsummer Night’s Dream and a particular moment in America’s literary history. It’s tragedy and comedy and heaven and hell and the exploration of these dualities. It’s a story about creativity and what it takes to be an artist. It’s a story about stories and where they come from and who they belong to.

It will break your heart in the best way. Not gently, though.

My first exposure to Valente’s work was her Fairyland books for young readers, which I read aloud to my daughter until she finally decided she was too old for bedtime stories any longer. I’ve since decided that every single thing Cat Valente writes deserves to be read aloud, just for the sheer joy of feeling her words roll off one’s tongue. Read it to a baby (goodness knows they don’t know any better) or to your pet or just to yourself in the privacy of your own home. Just do it, because it’s beautiful. Then go do the same with all of Valente’s other work.

The only negative of this book is that the hardcover is extremely expensive. Unless you are a collector of books, I’d suggest opting for the ebook, which is the best $5 you could spend this year.

Book Reviews, Fantasy, Novella

Book Review: The Last Witness by K.J. Parker

1 Comment

The Last Witness is decidedly not my kind of book. If I wasn’t making a point of reading all of the Tor.com novellas in publication order, I would never have picked this one out based just upon its back cover copy. Needless to say, I’m glad that I’m working on this reading project, because I would be sad to have missed this little gem of a story.

The Last Witness deals with some rather heavy ideas about memory and storytelling—specifically the stories that we tell others and ourselves. It’s a fascinatingly speculative story with an intriguing perspective and a main character with a powerful magic that is the very definition of a double-edged sword. He can steal memories, but he remembers them all perfectly, himself. The story answers some of the questions that must be asked as a matter of course once you think up that kind of magic power.

As the story unfolds, we learn more and more about Parker’s wonderfully unreliable narrator, where he came from, and what having this power has made of him. There’s not a lot in this premise that is terribly surprising, but the story is well-constructed, and when the twist comes near the end it’s, well, not unexpected exactly, but so perfectly placed and executed that it provokes a deep emotional response as one is forced to change the way one thinks of the narrator and the story he’s told up to that point.

My biggest criticism of the book is that there are parts that are just plain confusing. Because of the mechanics of the narrator’s magical ability, he sometimes has a difficult time differentiating between his own natural memories and those that he’s gleaned through his work. While everything becomes clear by the end of the story, there were several times in the first third or so where I found myself struggling to make sense of it. This isn’t aided, either, by the fact that there are no chapters or other markers to clarify shifts between the narrator’s memories and other people’s memories that are being remembered by the narrator or between flashbacks and the present day events of the story. It’s not bad enough to make the story unreadable, but I could definitely see this being off-putting for people who (unlike myself) have no problem abandoning a book partway through.

I don’t expect that The Last Witness will be among my favorites of the Tor.com novellas, but I’m happy to have read it. It’s a solidly written story with an interesting protagonist, a clever twist, and a satisfying conclusion.

Book Reviews, Fantasy

Book Review: Updraft by Fran Wilde

1 Comment

Updraft is an exciting, inventive debut novel with a delightful protagonist and a unique and totally unexpected setting. I often think that authors have to pick and choose where they want to do things that are new and fresh and different, and Fran Wilde has chosen really well here by writing a relatively pedestrian story in a fascinating new fantasy world.

Kirit has never wanted to do anything other than become her mother’s apprentice and learn to be a trader between the tower communities that make up the world of Updraft, but her plans are derailed just days before she’s supposed to take her flight test so she can travel freely around the cities. The plot of Updraft is a simple one, really, a fairly classic coming-of-age-with-complications story as Kirit finds herself forced into a role she never wanted and starts uncovering secrets that make her question everything she thinks she knows.

­You can tell when reading Updraft that Wilde has really thought about every aspect of this world, and probably her greatest achievement is in the society she’s invented for the people who inhabit her bone tower cities. The largely oral traditions are well-thought-out in a world where lack of trees and paper would make for minimal written communication, and this is also, to a large degree, where the major ideas and themes of the novel come from. In a world without written records, who controls information, who has the power, and how does that affect a civilization?

Also, there are huge monsters called skymouths that sound something like enormous aerial squids and something like flying gulper eels. And it’s never exactly spelled out, but the bones these people are living on might be growing out of the back of something even bigger.

While I’ve read reviews that class Kirit as an “unlikable” heroine, I adored her. It’s refreshing to read about a girl character who isn’t anxious from the beginning to sacrifice herself for some greater cause, and I love that Kirit has a bit of a stubborn, selfish streak. Kirit doesn’t want any part of being some kind of chosen one, and she only participates in “destiny” under duress and with no romantic notions about it. Kirit is a tough girl from the start, and Updraft is the story of how she grows into a strong woman with a well-developed sense of civic responsibility.

Also a nice change from many other books about young heroines, Kirit isn’t neatly paired off with a man at the end of the novel. Instead, she’s made over her society and stands ready to be a significant part of a future that is very different from their history up to this point.

So far, it looks as if Updraft is planned as a standalone novel, but I rather hope that Fran Wilde returns to this world and these characters. For all that this is a book that deals mostly with the uncovering of secrets, I still feel as if there’s a lot more to be explored. I, for one, would still like to know what exactly the bone towers are the bones of.

 

Book Reviews, Fantasy

Book Review: The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson

1 Comment

The Traitor Baru Cormorant is a technically superb and compulsively readable novel that might also be the most frustrating thing I’ve read this year. It’s a book that comes very close to greatness only to fail so slightly, yet so completely, that it’s actually pretty impressive.

The story opens with the invasion of the child Baru Cormorant’s small island nation by the militarily, culturally, and economically hegemonic Empire of Masks. Baru’s entire life is disrupted by this momentous event, and she sets out on a lifelong quest to infiltrate the Empire itself, understand its workings, and find a way to avenge the wrongs that were done to her family and her people.

It’s a fascinating story from the very beginning, and Baru is an incredible character. I have a penchant for unlikable women in fiction, and Baru is, frankly, pretty despicable by the end of this book. She’s inscrutable and calculating. She’s cold and selfish and manipulative and arrogant. She gives words like duplicitous and treacherous new meaning. Baru Cormorant will do anything, say anything, sacrifice anything–or anyone–in pursuit of her long term goals. I love her, of course.

The enormous cast of supporting characters is equally well-drawn and works to bring the world to life. Every character works, from Baru’s three parents to the mysterious “benefactor” who sponsors Baru’s education and career to the woman Baru loves. Like every other detail of The Traitor, each and every character seems meticulously planned, and they all move around and through Baru Cormorant’s life like clockwork.

The Empire of Masks (or Masquerade) looms large over all of the characters we meet, as they are all either colonizers or colonized (and sometimes both). The Traitor is a pretty amazing portrait of the dynamics and complexities of colonization, and the Masquerade touches every aspect of people’s lives. In addition to language and currency, the Empire of Masks imposes law and order, educational standards, religion, strict “hygienic” practices (namely, no homosexual or polyamorous relationships), and eugenic breeding schemes. Like all empires, the Masquerade is a mix of good and bad; it’s not devoid of benefits for some of the people it colonizes, but it definitely brings its changes whether the colonized like it or not. It’s interesting to see an author making such an honest attempt at really deeply examining how that colonization works and what it does to people.

Which brings me to one of the two subtle-but-significant failures of The Traitor Baru Cormorant. While the novel tries to handle its themes with delicacy and nuance, and is helped along in this by staying strictly in Baru’s point of view, I can’t help but feel that in the end it’s all treated a bit glibly. The evil empire itself is almost too evil to be really believable, and the book makes far too much of a point to highlight the benefits of colonization. Even the choice to center the narrative so firmly on Baru’s POV weakens the message, as Baru’s identity becomes increasingly confused over the course of the novel as she slips further and further inside the mask she’s chosen to inhabit. Her real opinions become more and more opaque as the story goes on, and her perspective becomes unreliable and even slightly unhinged.

Rather than an account of a morally grey character navigating a complex political situation, the book becomes a simple story of power and corruption. Because of the heavy focus on the worst atrocities of the Masquerade, it’s easy to root for Baru against it, but Baru’s own lack of deep feeling undermines the very idea that she is sincerely opposed to the Empire. This lack of sincerity becomes absolutely palpable in the last third of the book, and it leads to the second major issue I had with the novel:

While the specifics of the ending are well-thought-out and make complete sense, the broad strokes of the ending are so heavily telegraphed in the last 30-40% of the book that the “shocking twist” is more likely to elicit groans than gasps. It’s really obvious, honestly, that this was always the story that was being told and things were always going to play out this way. Unfortunately, it’s just not that satisfying.

Perhaps I’m just old-fashioned, but I’m just not sure I “get” this book. I kind of love that Seth Dickinson has done something ostensibly new and different, but how different can it really be if I saw the ending coming so many miles away? Baru Cormorant is an amazing character, but it’s hard to really make a story work when its subject doesn’t, ultimately, get to be even an antihero. By the end of the book, Baru has lost sight of any noble goals she may have had and abandoned every principle she may have started with, so the final impression I was left with was one of existential bleakness and hopelessness so complete that it was actually a little depressing.

The Traitor Baru Cormorant is the most fun I’ve ever had reading a book this hyper-tragic, which is something special in itself, but it’s definitely not the sort of thing I want to reread over and over again. It’s funny and smart and cleverly plotted and often insightful, but it also might crush you under an enormous weight of despair. It’s a book that I want to love wholeheartedly, but that ended up leaving me cold.

Book Reviews, Books, Fantasy, Novella

Book Review: Sunset Mantle by Alter S. Reiss

Leave a comment

sunset-mantle-coverSunset Mantle is a sort of strange little book. It’s an interesting mix of things that I love (epic fantasy, low key romance, a huge battle scene) and things that I usually hate (military stories, few women characters, overly stoic and maladaptively principled hero), and I’ve kind of fallen in love with it.

Cete is exactly the sort of outcast slightly grizzled warrior character that would normally bore me to tears, but the first thing we learn about him is that he appreciates and longs for beautiful things. This is a simple, honest desire, and it’s a small aspect of the character of a man whose only business and skill is death, but who loves art. It’s this desire that is always at the core of the story in Sunset Mantle, and its frankly miraculous that Alter S. Reiss manages to make this novella work without it becoming mawkish and trite, but he does.

Marelle, the artisan who created the titular sunset mantle, is kind of a fascinating character to me. I really appreciate the first physical descriptions we get of her which are pleasantly unsexual and focus on qualities that are representative of her experiences and the unique ways she exists in the world. Her age is unstated, though it’s clear that she’s a young-but-mature woman, and her beauty or lack thereof is never remarked upon, though it’s shown amply later in the story that Cete at least finds her desirable. In the beginning, though, we learn about the way she carries herself, the ways that hard work has marked her, and the way she smiles directly at Cete–“the smile of one man to another, rather than that of a woman to a man.”

This particular passage is one that Reiss handles with delicate precision, establishing Marelle as a character who is both comforting and challenging to Cete and establishing Cete as a man who (sadly unusually in the epic fantasy genre) respects Marelle in a way that is refreshingly unpatronizing. The first two pages of this novella might be my favorite thing I’ve read in the fantasy genre in years, and they are the key to understanding and appreciating the rest of the book. It’s a great cold open that, while light on action, deftly and economically introduces the two most important characters in the story and makes them interesting and likable without resorting to any hackneyed or offensive tropes.

The world-building in Sunset Mantle is similarly superb, although there was a stretch between the opening scene and the end of the first third of the book where I wasn’t entirely sure I understood what was going on. This might have been intentional, to build suspense or something, but I found it just confusing, and I would have preferred a more straightforward explanation for how some of the political structures of this world are organized. All the same, when I finally got my bearings, I was impressed by the depth of detail Reiss has packed into such a short book. I’ve read 800-page novels with less world-building than Reiss packs into just over one hundred pages, and this world could easily support a much bigger story than the one told here.

Perhaps the greatest strength of Sunset Mantle is that it’s just plain well-written (aside from the above-mentioned early confusion about the political situation). It’s tightly plotted, generally easy to follow, contains an excellent battle at its climax, and has a satisfying ending that feels natural and earned. It’s a small and personal story that still manages to feel epic, and it has enough darkness and high stakes to be compelling but stops well enough short of being grimdark that the word “fun” can still be reasonably used to describe one’s Sunset Mantle reading experience.

Book Reviews, Books, Fantasy, Novella

Book Review: Witches of Lychford by Paul Cornell

Leave a comment

Witches of Lychford is every bit as beautiful as its truly lovely cover (somewhat reminiscent of the posters for my favorite ’90s teen witch flick, The Craft) suggests. Like its cover, Witches is a story painted in subtle tones to develop its themes with both a clear sensibility for small town life and a gentle humor that makes it a joy to read.

The story deals largely with themes related to the disruption and destruction of small towns by corporate interests. The villain here seems to me a pretty thinly veiled reference to Walmart (or Asda, I suppose, in the UK), and we learn that what’s at risk is not just destruction of the expected small town community virtues but also the destruction of the border between two worlds.

The really standout aspect of this novella, though, is its characters. The three women around whom the story revolves all have their own separate and unique personalities and character arcs, which unfold at a pace that is both tightly managed to fit inside just 144 pages but also leisurely enough to be enjoyable reading. Judith, Lizzie, and Autumn are exactly the sorts of women that I love to read about: smart, funny, brave, resourceful, flawed enough to feel real and with just the right amount of magic. They’re also supported by a cast of small-town characters that feel familiar without the use of any tired tropes and have enough depth to make me care about them and become even more invested in what happens to their town by making Lychford feel like a real place.

The plot is simple and straightforward, which is ideal for novella length works. It’s never too complicated and Paul Cornell has a real gift for knowing just how best to develop his story and characters. While the urgency of the story builds throughout the book, events never feel rushed, and emotional moments happen exactly when they need to. The ending is satisfying, but it isn’t too tidy or trite, and it’s open-ended enough that I could easily see this story being continued in another novella or novel.

Recommended reading for a lazy Sunday afternoon in fall. I’d suggest making a day of just reading and watching stuff with witches in it. Combine with Practical Magic, Hocus Pocus, and something pumpkin spice flavored.

Book Reviews, Fantasy, Novella

Book Review: The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps by Kai Ashante Wilson

Leave a comment

The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps is the first thing I’ve ever read by Kai Ashante Wilson, and I’m so glad I did, if for no other reason than that I went out right afterwards and also read his short stories, “The Devil in America” and “Super Bass,” which are similarly excellent. As the first of Tor.com’s new line of novellas, which have all been heavily promoted, I had high hopes for this book. I wasn’t disappointed.

This is a book that is deeply concerned with language, and this is apparent in every intricate detail of Wilson’s superbly crafted prose. The plot is thin and linear, with most of the “story” functioning as character portrait and world building. I could see this being a problem for readers who are looking for something more exciting, but the adventure here is less the physical journey of the caravan and more the emotional and spiritual journey of the titular character.

Demane is a character who has come a long way already by the time we meet him at the beginning of Sorcerer. He’s very much an outsider in the group of caravan guards that he’s currently traveling with as well as their more well-to-do employers. As the caravan travels into a large and untamed jungle, amidst rumors of a beast that is marauding along the road, we’re treated to a thorough exploration of Demane’s outsider status, largely through his interactions with other characters.

The worldbuilding is where The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps really stands out, though. It reminds me a little bit of Nnedi Okorafor’s Zahrah the Windseeker, which also contained a large and mysterious jungle and a city on the edge of it, but Sorcerer is much broader in its scope and is focused less on the exploration of the forest and more on an exploration of Demane’s interactions with the people he meets on his journey. Even the monster Demane must defeat at the end is never concretely described.

I would have liked to see more actual adventure and less standing around in a town talking about stuff. Because so much time was spent on what mostly amounted to a whole lot of incredible worldbuilding mixed with some incisive social commentary, the action at the end of the book felt rushed and the ending felt a little tacked on. While this was somewhat frustrating, it did whet my appetite for the setting, and I really, really hope that Wilson revisits this world in some longer fiction.

A final note: I bought an .epub version of the book, and I found the formatting to be a little bad. It wasn’t always clear when the story shifted between the present and flashbacks, and I don’t know if this was intentional or not. Either way, it was sometimes confusing and took me out of an otherwise immersive story.

Book Reviews, Fantasy

Book Review: The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins

Leave a comment

So, I’ve gotten pretty good at picking books to read these days so that I have a minimal number of bad reading experiences, which is great, and it’s a skill I’m happy to have finally mastered as I approach my mid-30s. The downside of this skill, however, is that I often feel like about every other book that I read is a new favorite, or my favorite book of [genre], or at least my favorite book of the current year, or the last six months or last five years, or whatever. You get the idea. The point is, eventually that “favorite” distinction starts to lose all meaning, especially since I seldom reread anything anymore. But still, sometimes I really mean it.

This time, I really, really mean it.

The Library at Mount Char is certainly my favorite book that I’ve read this summer, perhaps my favorite this year so far. It’s not the best book I’ve read lately, but it’s definitely the most fun I’ve had reading in a good while. Absolutely enough fun to earn itself a place on the running list of “favorites” I keep in my head.

I knew straight away that I would love this book because I was moved to giggles in the first paragraph, which introduces us to a protagonist who only gets more weird and wonderful as you continue reading. I don’t know if The Library at Mount Char will last as one of my favorites, but its heroine, Carolyn, definitely makes my list of all-time favorite female characters.

We first meet Carolyn covered in blood and walking barefoot down a highway. She’s just killed a man, but she’s actually thinking about tacos. I fell in love with her immediately.

We soon learn that Carolyn is one of twelve “librarians” who started off as orphaned children adopted by a mysterious “Father” and taken to live in a library. Father isn’t a god, exactly, but he’s something of an all-powerful and ancient wizard kind of guy. Each of the twelve adopted siblings has been assigned a catalog–one portion of Father’s incredibly vast body of knowledge–that they alone are responsible for, and to study from another’s catalog brings a heavy punishment. Carolyn’s catalog is languages. Michael’s is animals. David’s is war. Jennifer’s is healing. Margaret’s is death. Other siblings’ roles are less obvious or well-defined, but it’s obvious that, all together, the breadth of their studies is pretty comprehensive. The story begins with Father’s disappearance and the librarians scrambling to figure out what has happened.

Although there are a couple of other important point of view characters–Erwin and Steve–Carolyn is undeniably the main character, and Carolyn is who I found most compelling and interesting to read about, even from other characters’ point of view. She’s a smart and resourceful woman, and she’s self-reliant in a way that I found refreshing. Her flaws are real and serious–never cute or quirky, although Scott Hawkins writes about all of his characters with a dry sort of humor that had me laughing aloud more than once. Due to her unusual upbringing, Carolyn’s not always great at being human. She can be narcissistic and is sometimes callously cruel, and she has to fuck up big time before she becomes who she needs to be by the end of the book.

This, I think, is what I like best about Carolyn. She’s allowed to be kind of awful in a way that female characters often aren’t, and there’s not a hint of apology for her in the text. She’s not always relatable or sympathetic, the mistakes she makes have terrible consequences, and she actually does some things that are kind of evil, but at no point was I not on Carolyn’s side. Every step of the way I was cheering for her to be successful in her ultimate goal (which is a pretty amazing goal that I’m not going to spoil).

Hawkins’ prose is perhaps just workmanlike, but he has a knack for capturing hyperviolence as well as humor and even some very tender moments in an almost naturalistic way. The world he’s created doesn’t feel real exactly, but it feels alive and lived in, with just a hint of high camp in in the details. The action scenes have a cinematic quality to them that makes me hope that someone gets the rights to film this story (although I think it would require a tv miniseries to do it properly). Overall, there’s an absurdist quality and a kitschiness to the novel that I found deeply enjoyable. And while the prose may not be especially beautiful, it’s highly readable and the story is structured in such a way that I didn’t want to put the book down at all (which is why I read it less than a day, in basically two long sessions).

The Library at Mount Char is definitely a book I will be evangelizing for this fall and winter, and I’m actually looking forward to reading it again myself, perhaps closer to Halloween when the nights are longer and colder and I can curl up under a blanket with this book and a warm drink. In the meantime, I’ll be suggesting to everyone I know that they read this book that way.

Do it. You won’t regret it.

Book Reviews, Fantasy

Book Review: The House of Shattered Wings by Aliette de Bodard

1 Comment
debodard-houseofshatteredwings1
One thing the book DOES have going for it, at least, is gorgeous cover art in both the UK (left) and US (right).

I want so much to say that I loved The House of Shattered Wings, but I actually found it a little disappointing. Aliette de Bodard’s On a Red Station, Drifting is one of my all time favorite novellas, and I really enjoyed her Obsidian and Blood trilogy even though I’m not usually into the magical detective genre, but The House of Shattered Wings just didn’t really impress me. Which sucks, because there’s not much I dislike more than being let down by a book I’ve been so highly looking forward to.

Not that The House of Shattered Wings is a particularly bad book, either. It just doesn’t quite manage to deliver on its really excellent concept. This is primarily because, in the end, it turns out to be an awfully shallow book. This shallowness is characteristic of de Bodard’s previous novel-length work as well, but I think it worked for Obsidian and Blood because the setting there (15th century Tenochtitlan) was so unique and the genre (sort of a magical noir detective thing) of that series is largely plot- rather than either setting- or character-driven. Unfortunately, in The House of Shattered Wings the plot is thin, and the book is dragged further down by shoddy world-building and poor characterization.

As with de Bodard’s earlier work, one of the things that most attracted my to this book was the description of its setting in the cover copy. Post-apocalyptic Paris? After some kind of devastating magical war? With fallen angels involved? Sounds awesome! Except it just never manages to come to life on the page. Everything feels just a bit sterile, too contrived and theatrical to feel real.

The characters as well are all a bit flat and underdeveloped. Madeleine and Philippe have the most potential, but it’s all squandered by the fairly predictable ending of the book. Isabelle is the character that I found most compelling, but she’s never a point of view character, so we don’t get to know her very well and her thoughts and motivations remain largely opaque. Selene, on the other hand, is a character who might have benefited from being left more mysterious. In general, I felt like every revelation about all of the characters was more to do with their history than anything they were actually going through in the book. And that history sounds a lot better to read about than the story de Bodard decided to tell.

The setting might as well be a flat painted backdrop for all the depth it has; the characters were dull and without much growth; and while there are a lot of potentially neat story details and some very cool ideas about magic and religion and colonization and identity, none of them are ever quite done the justice they deserve. I didn’t hate The House of Shattered Wings, and I may check out its sequel when that comes out, but I will probably just be paying more attention to de Bodard’s short fiction for a while instead.

Book Reviews, Books, Fantasy

Book Review: The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

1 Comment

N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season is probably the book I’ve been looking forward to the most this year (it’s at least tied with Catherynne Valente’s Radiance), and it’s hands-down the best book I’ve read so far in 2015. I mean, I’m still totally devastated by it like a week after finishing it, but in a good way.

Even the prologue of this book–and I mostly despise prologues–is equal parts harrowing and thrilling. It does a great job of setting the mood for the next 500 pages, and when it’s put in proper context by reading the rest of the book–and I highly recommend going back and rereading the prologue when you’re done–it’s even more impressive.

The Stillness is one of the most unique fantasy worlds created in recent years. I love the idea of the world being wracked by repeated apocalypses, and Jemisin’s imagining of the sorts of cultures and societal structures that might arise as a way of dealing with such an unpredictable environment is sensible and richly detailed. The magic, orogeny, is wonderfully creative, well-conceived, and beautifully executed throughout the novel. I especially liked the terminology used to describe orogeny and orogenes. Especially notable are the differences in the ways that different characters talk about orogeny, including the ways in which the book’s orogene characters talk and think about themselves. Even the slur, “rogga,” works well precisely because it’s so reminiscent of other, more familiar slurs.

At the same time, however, there is no symbolism or allegory here. The orogenes are not a metaphor. Rather, Jemisin uses the fantastic to create a picture of something real and true about humanity, but free of any obvious real-world parallels (although not without identifiable real-world and literary inspiration). The Stillness is not a mirror of our world or a vision of our future. Instead it’s an exquisitely original fantasy world peopled with characters that are deeply and often heartrendingly human.

The story is broken up into three narrative threads: that of Essun, a mother of a dead son and a missing daughter who is searching for her murderous husband; that of Damaya, an orogene child; and that of Syenite, a young orogene on an important mission. Damaya and Syenite’s stories are told from a fairly close third-person point of view, but it’s the second person point of view used for Essun’s sections that is the most arresting part of the novel. Essun is absolutely captivating, and the second-person point of view works to make the reader intensely involved in the story, grants a sense of immediacy to the narrative, but also creates just enough detachment so that one isn’t completely overwhelmed with all the things that Essun is dealing with.

Even still, Essun’s story just destroyed me, and I’m torn between wishing desperately for the next book in the series and thinking that it’s probably best that I’ll have a year or so to recover before then.

The Fifth Season is one of those rare fantasy novels that manages to be both an incredible triumph of world-building and amazing character-driven story. It’s a smart, inventive, fast moving book that deftly weaves together its fractured narratives to create a nearly flawless gem of storytelling. I have loved everything I’ve read by N.K. Jemisin, but this book really is a masterpiece.