The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth, 1) (edició 2015)

Enjoyed this first volume in Jemisin's Fifth Season trilogy, and will look forward to the next installments. This one laid some really interesting ground for what is to come. ( )

addictive. ( )

I’m a real Grinch when it comes to science fiction and fantasy. I’m always willing to take a chance on the genre but find myself disappointed by boring medieval magicks or tongue-tying cyber talk that feels super made-up, hokey and lame. Which is why I was really surprised when The Fifth Season, a high-fantasy epic about the end of the world, captured my undivided attention.

In The Fifth Season, tribes of people live on a supercontinent that is constantly being threatened by ongoing earthquakes, volcanoes and other natural calamities. Their survival depends on a much-feared and derided group called Orogenes; people with the ability to control and manipulate the energy of the earth. Jemisin’s book is structured so wholly and completely that it eases the reader into a world that feels grounded in reality rich with culture, history and language.

Her characters are mutli-layered, complex, and sometimes deeply unlikable yet sympathetic. Jemisin also doesn’t hand-feed or over-explain to the reader all the nuanced exchanges between characters, which makes interpreting their interactions SO much fun. And, she writes about sexuality and gender in such a fluid, natural way that I never feel like she’s congratulating herself on being inclusive – it was just another holistic part of the book.

As a reader of some YA fantasy, I do have a mild fatigue of the elemental powers trope. There’s always a set of tribes and they’re always responsible for the tides or terraforming or [insert other elemental thing here]. But controlling the planet’s elements is really only a small part of Jemisin’s book. I ended up loving this book so much I bumped another book on my TBR to pick up the second book in the series. ( )

Mein erstes Buch dieses Jahr ist gleich ein Treffer. Dieser Fantasyroman in einer finsteren, postapokalyptischen Welt, in der jederzeit erneut Katastrophen auftreten können, hat mich in seinen Bann gezogen und ich werde ganz sicher auch Band 2 lesen, auch wenn ich an einigen Punkten schlucken musste. Einige Ereignisse und Figuren war doch schwer zu verdauen.

Die drei Handlungsstränge scheinen zunächst wenig miteinander zu tun zu haben, man erfährt auch nicht, in welcher Relation sie zeitlich zueinander stehen - bis schließlich am Ende alles zusammengeführt wird. Der Schreibstil des dritten Handlungsstrangs ist extrem ungewöhnlich (zweite Person Singular - würde man das analog zum Ich-Erzähler dann Du-Erzähler nennen?) und hebt ihn von den beiden anderen Strängen ab.

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I wish I could recommend this for my own kid, but he still recoils at frank depictions, discussions of sexuality, so it is going to be a while. But Mensch Meier, this is one fine way to start a series. I immediately started book two. Third thought: thanks Ezra Klein at Vox for the cool world building podcast w Ms. Jemisin. ( )