Review: The Stone Sky

The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

No one has ever won the Hugo Award for Best Novel three times in a row. Even the list of those who have won it twice consecutively is a very short one: Orson Scott Card (1986, 1987 and don't get me started on that man), Lois McMaster Bujold (1991, 1992) and N. K. Jemisin (2016, 2017). I wonder if 2018 will be the year we have a three-time consecutive winner. This book is as perfect a melding of science fiction and fantasy as I have ever read. The world it gives us is so alien and yet its conflicts and its characters are utterly timeless. It is the best book in the trilogy, and I believe the best fiction book I’ve read this year.

I have waited a while to summarize my thoughts on the The Stone Sky, the conclusion of N.K. Jemisin's (who I just cannot stop thinking of as Nora because I want to call her by her name) simply stunning Broken Earth trilogy. It published just when I was returning from the Helsinki WorldCon, where she won her second Hugo for The Obelisk Gate. Things were hectic for me then, as my beloved cat was critically ill. So I put off starting the novel, in order to give it my full attention, and then once I did start the audiobook, narrated by the fabulous Robin Miles, I had to evacuate with my family due to Hurricane Irma. I had made it to almost 80% and more than a few friends kept asking (read: pestering me) if I was finished yet. One was ready to pull her hair out when I told her, after returning home after the hurricane, that I was restarting it, yes, listening to the audiobook again, from the beginning, so I would have no distraction. In truth, part of me didn't want to finish the book, because then… it would be finished. I knew that there was no way there was not going to be heartache at the end of this series. But most of all, the series would be at an end, and you know how it is- that special sadness when you finish a series you love. Once I did finish it, it took a while for me to even form words to put on a page. Because I was blown away. My head still spins from it. It has been many years since I have read a book that has impacted me emotionally as this book has.

When we began the series, The Fifth Season gave us a narrow focus on Damaya/Syenite/Essun. In subsequent books, Jemisin has given us a progressively wider view of the horribly flawed (dystopian seems like a mild word) world that Essun lives in. Although the books have given us the wider angle, we still have great depth of field, both with characters, and Earth’s history. While much has been written about Jemisin's awe-inspiring world-building skills, what lingers with me is the depth of her characters. Their complexity, and their all too real emotions, seem almost as if she was giving us her therapeutic insights into people who, by the end of the series, whether stone eaters or orogenes or stills or guardians, have become very real to me. I felt like I knew them, I mourned them, I celebrated them. Her insights into motherhood and shattered childhood are particularly poignant. And the evil Earth? Perhaps the most misunderstood character of all.

The Stone Sky manages to answer many questions, about the origins of orogenes, of stone eaters, of guardians and of Seasons. It gives us the perspective of the past 40,000 years through the eyes of Hoa, who becomes a POV character, giving us vital backstory about how we got to this horrible broken place.  (We also get brief POV thoughts from Alabaster, btw.) We learn how the Earth got to be broken and most of all, why some things that are broken should just be discarded. But there was so much more to this book than all this. First of all, how often do we see a sci-fi/fantasy series where the main character is a middle-aged mother of three? How often do we see the protagonists trying to destroy their world rather than preserving it? How often do you have your two protagonists acting in direct opposition to one another yet remaining... protagonists? Can we possibly choose between Nassun and Essun, given what we know about them and about what they have suffered? Most of all, The Stone Sky gives us the backdrop of Earth’s history- its cycles of oppression, the enslavement of one race or another, the violence visited upon the planet, all proving time and time again that this Earth, these people, are so broken that it is almost impossible to envision fixing things without destroying everything and simply starting over (exactly Nassun’s take). Alabaster’s vision, of recapturing the Moon into the Earth's gravitational field to end the cycles of cataclysmic fifth seasons, seems at times like it could never possibly be enough to right what is wrong. Because what’s wrong is more than just geological and meteorological. The culture of abuse, enslavement are repeated again and again. And yet, removing fifth seasons could change the balance of those left living on the Earth, thereby possibly changing the Earth itself.

As she says in her moving Afterward, “Where there is pain in this book, it is real pain; where there is anger, it is real anger; where there is love, it is real love. You’ve been taking this journey with me, and you’re always going to get the best of what I’ve got…”

Nora wasn’t kidding.




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