Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsIn retrospect, the best beginning to a book series I've ever read.
Reviewed in the United States on September 28, 2015
I have edited this review after finishing the series.
I started off wondering if I would finish this book; there were some things I initially perceived as flaws, but turned out to be strokes of pure genius. I'll explain later. I liked Jemison's previous work in The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and the subsequent novels in that series. The Dreamblood books were more of a miss for me my first read through, but after having gone back through them again, I appreciate them more and they were wonderful stories as well. Going into this book, I had mixed expectations. As it turns out, the book, despite my initial misgivings, is excellent. The story is wonderfully written and fleshed out, with a thought-provoking setting and interesting characters. The treatment of orogenes (i.e. magic users) is somewhat reminiscent of the Dragon Age video games, although it definitely has its own twists; the similarities are in how orogenes are controlled and feared by their society. I found myself eagerly anticipating my nightly reading times to sink into this world.
I do have a minor quibble with some of the language the author developed for her world. Jemisin has developed a sort of jargon for her world that I found to be unrealistic. It's hard to describe exactly why it didn't work for me; it just felt cheesy in that way that sci-fi lingo can become cheesy. For example, northern latititudes and southern latititudes are referred to as nomidlats and somidlats or something like that. The word 'rust' is often a swear word, which just sounded lame when reading through it: "rusting hell!" See what I mean? Communities are called 'comms.' Every facet of the society depicted in The Fifth Season is centered around long term survival after periods of extreme environmental adversity, but I could never make sense of why they would have lost other vocabulary to describe settlements; why does it have to be "comms" to describe any hamlet, village, town? That simply didn't seem very realistic. The characters in the novel certainly use advanced vocabulary in all other respects. I got to where I could overlook this stuff, but initially it a little harder for me to suspend disbelief throughout the read.
Another thing that bothered me was one character's points-of-view being written in the 2nd person. This character's chapters are the only ones that are like this, so it is jarring to read several chapters in the 3rd person to then suddenly be thrust into a chapter that literally sounds as if someone is telling what YOU are doing/seeing/thinking/saying etc. Initially, I thought it was simply incorrect to use the 2nd person. After having completed the series, it was genius and there is no other way this story could have been told as effectively. It will bother you. It will make you feel like the Author is trying too hard to make you feel her characters' feelings. In the end, you'll bask in sheer amazement about the courage it took to do it, and how fantastically well it works.
It was the above two flaws that had me debating putting the book down and moving on to something else. I am happy I didn't, it's a pretty darn good book. There is another problem with the book that needs to be discussed.
This is a world where forced breeding occurs between people in order to ensure the survival of the human species. I commend Jemisin for including homosexual and transsexual characters in this book. She treats them as any other sort of character. At first I didn't think anything of it, but there is a drawback to that approach. I understand that Jemisin wanted to write these characters in an inclusive way. I just think that the world they lived in would never have allowed it. In a society where producing offspring is critical for the survival of the species, I found it incongruous that homosexuality would be so liberally accepted; not because of my own views on the topic, which are quire liberal, but because of the context of the world I was reading about in this book. In this world, people who might not produce offspring might be viewed as with suspicion or as a threat. In our world, persecution of homosexuals has most often arisen in areas where resources are scarce and survival is difficult. I think both the impact and the immersion would have been helped if the society was hostile to them, and then their worth was shown over time by their absolute critical importance to the continued existence of the human species.
The story, however, is so amazingly good that these minor gripes do not detract from its telling in any significant way. I loved this story, and the series itself is the best I've ever read.
