Summary Twenty-eight florins a month is a huge price to pay for a man to stand between you and the Wild. Twenty-eight florins a month is nowhere near enough when a wyvern's jaws snap shut on your helmet in the hot stink of battle, and the beast starts to rip the head from your shoulders. But if standing and fighting is hard, leading a company of men—or worse, a company of mercenaries—against the intelligent, deadly creatures of the Wild is even more challenging. It takes all the advantages of birth, training, and the devil's luck to do it. The Red...
The Price of Power by Michael Michel
Summary Prince Barodane could not hold back the darkness. Not even in himself. He laid an innocent city in its grave and then died a hero. In his absence, war whispers across the land. Power-hungry highborn dispatch spies and assassins to the shadows as they maneuver for the throne, while an even greater threat rises in the South. Monsters and cultists flock to the banners of a mad prophet determined to control reality…and then shatter it. Destiny stalks three to the brink of oblivion. A dead prince that isn’t actually dead. Barodane buried his shameful past in a stupor of...
The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin
Summary
This is the way the world ends. . .for the last time.
It starts with the great red rift across the heart of the world’s sole continent, spewing ash that blots out the sun. It starts with death, with a murdered son and a missing daughter. It starts with betrayal and long dormant wounds rising up to fester.
This is the Stillness, a land long familiar with catastrophe, where the power of the earth is wielded as a weapon. And where there is no mercy.
Review
N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season is a triumph of the fantasy grimdark subgenre and has gained renown in the broader literary world, winning the 2016 Hugo Award and shattering readers since its publication in 2015. The novel is a deeply depressing fantasy set in a post-apocalyptic world trades between three points of view (POVs). This book put me through a collection of emotions as I placed myself in some of the uncomfortable situations each of the three main characters suffers through. Mrs. Jemisin writes reflective yet straight prose presenting themes of control, parenthood, sexuality, and prejudice throughout five hundred pages. Reading the starkness of the world Mrs. Jemisin created, the quiet moments of tenseness between each of the three main characters’ arcs never end, and somehow, I kept turning the page to see if things would get better and knowing that it most likely would not.
The three main characters are Syenite, a highly motivated and intelligent pupil of the Fulcrum, Damaya, a young child who is given the protection of a Guardian because she has extraordinary powers that she must learn to control, and Essun, a middle-aged woman looking for her husband and their last surviving child.
“You’re a gift of the earth—but Father Earth hates us, never forget, and his gifts are neither free nor safe.”
For me, one of the challenges of the book, besides the bleakness of the environment and the supporting cast, is that one of the three main POVs is told from a second person POV, which is jarring when jumping from character to character, mainly when the other POVs use a different writing perspective. I pushed through this as I have with other books, and it paid off as each character arc meet in the end.
The setting and ideas formulated through the three main POVs are placed in a stark and unforgiving dystopian apocalypse wrecked by earthquakes (or other disasters). A season is a disaster or significant world event and the corresponding time between when people attempt to rebuild, knowing they must prepare for the next season. A never-ending cycle of preparation and disaster, which, when looking forward, feels now only familiar. The people who walk the world and have no power are called “stills,” and the smaller portion of the population (less than one percent) are called “orogenes”. These people can cause earthquakes, kill with frost or cold, and perform other feats. They are hated and feared by most and used as tools or weapons to control specific areas through a form of lifelong military service or enslavement. The Fulcrum attempts to use “orogens” to control territories, lessen the effects of a season, and calm the rumbling ground under the different shattered fault lines of the land. The Fulcrum a government-like entity that trains orogenes harbor shadier secrets, and upon learning them, I realized how cruel the world Mrs. Jemisin has created.
“You think you matter?” All at once, he smiles. It’s ugly, cold as the vapor curling off the ice. “You think any of us matter beyond what we can do for them? Whether we obey or not.”
Mental and physical pain is felt through the three main characters in various circumstances. Mrs. Jemisin’s storytelling had me hating Schaffa through most of the book, yet for a few moments, it somehow changed my thoughts on Schaffa, a Guardian who broke a young girl’s hand at the start of the book at the end. I still hated him, but somehow, I nodded, if not in agreement but in understanding at the end. The last few pages linger like a ink stains on my fingers.
The Fifth Season provides complicated characters making choices in extreme circumstances at the end of the world, and the last portion of the book is the eye-opening, “holy shit” writing that secures this book’s acclaim and awards. This review is spoiler-free, but let me say yes, it deserves the treatment it gets from the professional press and others who pick it up and make it through the entire book.
“Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall; Death is the fifth and master of all.”
Mrs. Jemisin doesn’t play with words; each sentence and word are set down deliberately, providing further growth for the characters and overarching story. She laces the three POVs charters separated at the start of the book, slowly twisting them until their fateful and dramatic ending and maybe everything that comes after. The narrative that drives the books is shown through the pacing. Long silences where life occurs, people prepare, and bursts of violence and destruction. Where I thought the writing shined was the agony of life between the disasters, learning how everyone barely coped with surviving and existing, which was felt on each page.
I read a paperback version of The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin Book 1 of the Broken Earth Trilogy printed in 2020. The book is around 130,000 words with a cover created by Lauren Panepinto, which shows a decaying wall with a faded sculpted metal and stone flourish. Its morose simplicity represents the tone found inside the pages. This book is not easy to recommend to everyone, but it was worth my time, and if you’re courageous enough, I hope it’s worth yours.
Empire of Silence by Christopher Ruocchio
Empire of Silence by Christopher Ruocchio The Sun Eater: Book One Summary Hadrian Marlowe, a man revered as a hero and despised as a murderer, chronicles his tale in the galaxy-spanning debut of the Sun Eater series, merging the best of space opera and epic fantasy. It was not his war. The galaxy remembers him as a hero: the man who burned every last alien Cielcin from the sky. They remember him as a monster: the devil who destroyed a sun, casually annihilating four billion human lives—even the Emperor himself—against Imperial orders. But Hadrian was not a hero. He was...
Silverstone’s Book Blog Year in Review Part One
Hello and welcome to The Silverstone’s Book Blog Year in Review. The bloggers here will be reviewing their top three favorite reads of 2023. For me, it was a year of firsts as I published my first fantasy novel, received my first review, was invited to join Silverstone’s Book Blog, and participated in several contests for the indie community. I’ve made some amazing friends and hope to continue into 2024 with more triumphs. I read over fifteen Science Fiction and Fantasy (SFF) books this year out of twenty-seven total books. I tend to read about twenty-four books a year, with...
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
Summary It takes a graveyard to raise a child. Nobody Owens, known as Bod, is an ordinary boy. He would be entirely normal if he didn’t live in a cemetery, being raised by ghosts, with a guardian who belongs to neither the world of the living nor the dead. There are adventures in the graveyard for a boy—an ancient Indigo Man, a gateway to the abandoned city of ghouls, the strange and terrible Sleer. But if Bod leaves the graveyard, he will be in danger from the man Jack—who has already killed Bod’s family. Review In his compositions, Neil Gaiman...
Platinum Tinted Darkness by Timothy Wolff
Summary The Kingdom of Boulom has been lost. The realms have already seen what happens when the Gods and their Harbingers are unchecked. Destruction. Chaos. Death. The Gods can’t be trusted. No one knows that better than David Williams, the Leader of the Guardians tasked to protect the Realm from the Gods and their powerful Harbingers ever since the fall of Boulom. Six Guardians take their pledge to leave the disputes of the kingdoms behind and live only to stop the Harbingers and protect the Realms from the Gods. Serenna Morgan, a famed Crystal Mage and Guardian struggles with the...
The Fear of Moncroix by Bryan Asher
Summary: All the Waywards have Fallen… After a mission against the Royal Vampiric Court goes wrong, all Waywards are slaughtered. All except one. Davion, the last surviving member, must consume potions to mask himself and hide amongst the people who killed his brethren. After a decade of living this double life, Davion resigned to his new purgatory. But all will not remain calm for him or the Court. An unknown swordsman arrives, and after killing several Royal Vampires, a rumor spreads that he’s searching for anyone still belonging to The Wayward order. Davion decides he must track down this mysterious...
The Traitors We Are by Michael Roberti
Summary In a world where writing disappears when the author dies, Cael Oberlan watches the last gasping breaths of his best friend. As his friend's signature fades, he pulls a scrap of paper out of his pocket and a name disappears. Cael only wants vengeance for his friend; however, the nagging suspicion that his father, who started this war, hasn't given him the whole story about his role in this conflict threatens to unravel everything he ever thought he knew about himself and his people fighting for freedom. As the nephew of the King of Harfel, Emil Trestinsen should...
The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson
The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson Book one of the Stormlight Archives Summary: Roshar is a world of stone and storms. Uncanny tempests of incredible power sweep across the rocky terrain so frequently that they have shaped ecology and civilization alike. Animals hide in shells, trees pull in branches, and grass retracts into the soilless ground. Cities are built only where the topography offers shelter. War rages on a ruined landscape called the Shattered Plains. Kaladin, who traded his medical apprenticeship for a spear to protect his little brother, has been reduced to slavery. In a war that makes...