Jul 14

Jul 14 The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth, #3)

Author: NK Jemisin
Publisher: Orbit
View on Goodreads

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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

***Description is spoiler for The Fifth Season and The Obelisk Gate***

This is the way the world ends ... for the last time.

The Moon will soon return. Whether this heralds the destruction of humankind or something worse will depend on two women.

Essun has inherited the power of Alabaster Tenring. With it, she hopes to find her daughter Nassun and forge a world in which every orogene child can grow up safe.

For Nassun, her mother's mastery of the Obelisk Gate comes too late. She has seen the evil of the world, and accepted what her mother will not admit: that sometimes what is corrupt cannot be cleansed, only destroyed.

The remarkable conclusion to the post-apocalyptic and highly acclaimed trilogy that began with the multi-award-nominated The Fifth Season.

TL;DR Review

The Stone Sky is an incredible conclusion to The Broken Earth trilogy. I truly couldn’t put it down, and it solidified this trilogy as an all-time favorite.

For you if: You read The Fifth Season. (Read The Fifth Season. Just do it.)

Full Review

***Review is spoiler for The Fifth Season and The Obelisk Gate***

“But there are none so frightened, or so strange in their fear, as conquerors. They conjure phantoms endlessly, terrified that their victims will someday do back what was done to them — even if, in truth, their victims couldn’t care less about such pettiness and have moved on. Conquerors live in dread of the day when they are shown to be, not superior, but simply lucky.”

The Stone Sky is truly the conclusion that the Broken Earth trilogy deserves, and it confirmed something I had suspected ever since I read the prologue of The Fifth Season: this trilogy is up there as an all-time favorite.

The Fifth Season is methodical, gripping, demanding to be read slowly and absorbed with precision. The Obelisk Gate is a bridge between the first and third books, but one that lays its characters bare and builds to what has always promised to be a world-shattering conclusion. And The Stone Sky is that conclusion, one that will not debase itself by allowing you to look away.

Until I got to this book, I wasn’t sure why it was billed as sci-fi rather than fantasy. Sure, there was a lot about technology, but it’s also all powered by what they called magic. This book makes it clearer that the trilogy does fit into the sci-fi category, but as someone who loves fantasy and only occasionally dips into the sci-fi genre, I still really loved it.

Truly, this ending was epic. Of solar-system-sized proportions. The chapters cycle through Essun, Nassun, and — new to this book — Hoa as he gives us all the background information we have been waiting for, about what exactly happened to the moon and how the initial Shattering first came about. But there’s so much more there, about genocide and prejudice and greed and fear and revolution. I was hungry for more of Hoa’s story, but also torn because I knew that Essun and Nassun’s journeys were hurtling together and I had no idea how (or if) that was going to work itself out.

I read the trilogy with a formal reading group led by The Center for Fiction, and that was a great decision. Jemisin is entirely unapologetic about looking topics like colonization, slavery, and genocide in the face — but the depth of discussion in these classes helped me get out of it so much more than I might have on my own.