(This review was written before I launched the review site)
I just finished reading The Stone Sky, by NK Jemisin.
And…man.
This was a really good series.
And this was a really good book.
This series feels like an entirely new genre. Geologic science-fantasy, or something. It looks like fantasy at first, and then you realize it’s post-apocalyptic in a world where apocalypses are common, and then you realize it’s science fiction but in a fantasy world–
I’m finding it hard to write about this book, and this trilogy, because there are so many little things in it that I love. There’s so many layers here.
The Broken Earth series gives you a full and mythic history of the world without ever expositing at you. By the end of The Stone Sky, you know every major event in how the world has been shaped, and how this society happened, and all of it is important to the story. There are no background details, or at least very few. This story, you slowly come to realize, is the story of the world. It’s one of those rare books where all of the vague sinister declarations in the earlier novels actually make complete and honest sense by the time you’re done reading the trilogy. All of the weird magic, and all of the things that seemed like they were just noise or detail to make the world feel more fleshed out, it’s all important. Nothing is just a story. Everything has a point, and you need to pay attention to what’s missing.
This is a series written by a very, very clever author, who proceeded under the assumption that her readers are also very clever, and goddamn if it doesn’t work. I really can’t emphasize enough just how smart this book, and this series in general, is. It’s great.
I honestly don’t want to say anything else about it, because I took so much delight in all the discoveries I was given or which I figured out on my own, and I want you to experience the same thrill of learning it all yourself. Where orogeny came from, where the stone eaters came from, the face of the Earth, the people who built the obelisks that have been literally hanging over each of the other two books–it all comes together here, in the end, in an empty city on the other side of a shattered world.
Make a better world, Essun and Nassun and Hoa and all you other beaten down and broken people who know that things could be better. Never be patient and never stop. The book’s final message is so goddamn raw, and so real, and so pertinent to our current day and age, that I don’t think it’s ever going to leave my head. It remains there, etched in stone.
This is the way the world ends. For the last time.
I would recommend this series to anyone, and have been ever since I started reading it.