Breakaway Books

Authored by N.K. Jemisin; Published in 2015; Fantasy

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️🏖️🏖️🏖️

The Fifth Season is totally transporting—these four hundred pages introduce you to a new world, a new language, a new way of living. I can be intimidated by books that do this, that immerse me in a whole new culture. It can feel like I’m playing catch up as soon as I turn the first page! Somehow, The Fifth Season hooked me right from the start. 

The novel tells the story of three women, all forced into unpleasant and possibly life threatening circumstances as the world literally quakes around them. It’s a fast-moving book—which I enjoy. With the number of events crammed into this novel, I found it exhilarating and nearly impossible to put it down. The novel is narrated in three perspectives, switching off between the three women, and I enjoyed transitioning between the three plotlines. As one story intensified emotionally, it was a relief to switch to another perspective that was less jarring.

At its heart, this is a story about power and how much humanity is scared of it if we cannot control it. It made me think about how much that fear can turn into dehumanizing, cruel behavior. While that made the novel depressing at times, I was too enthralled by trying to figure out what was going on to be too saddened. That being said, this version of earth is easy to see as the inevitable ending of a planet wrecked by climate change, so if that is a sensitive topic for you, I can’t recommend it.

I love the fact that at the end of the first book of this series, I haven’t figured out this whole world. It makes me want to dive into the second book right away. I’m excited to see what happens next!