A friend of mine handed me a book recently, and though it’s not one that I would probably have picked up on my own, the complexity of the storytelling and the new usage of old words and phrases drew me in.
I don’t usually talk about new books on Book Gnome, but this book is worth talking about. The Fifth Season is the first book of the Broken Earth Trilogy, by N.K. Jemisin. I won’t give spoilers, so if you’ve been waiting to read it, don’t worry.
I will say, if you are a fan of Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred or her Lilith’s Brood series, you will definitely appreciate Jemisin’s heartbreaking story of a mother searching for her last remaining child and the adventure she finds herself on as she travels through a world on the brink of destruction.
For those who haven’t read Octavia E. Butler’s books, Kindred, published in 1979, is about a woman who is thrown from her own time into the antebellum South and meets her own ancestors. Desperate to return to her own time, she has to face all of the sorrows and troubles that her great-grandmother could not escape.
Butler’s Lilith’s Brood: the Xenogenesis Trilogy was originally published in the late 1980s. It includes Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago. The series begins with the revival of life on Earth after humans are wiped out by nuclear war. Lilith wakes up on an alien ship where she is told she must become the mother of a new race of humanity.
All of these books give a glimpse of different worlds, while bringing out the imperfections of our own. Both Jemisin and Butler are masters of their craft. Not only are you swept away by the beautiful use of language and story, but you are pulled into situations that make you think, make you cry out at every indignity, and make you root for the characters, even as they make decisions that you hope you never have to make.
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