Displaying 1 of 1 2015 Format: Book Author: Jemisin, N. K., author. Title: The fifth season / N.K. Jemisin. Edition: First edition. Publisher, Date: New York, NY : Orbit, 2015. Description: 498 pages : map ; 21 cm. Summary: In a post-apocalyptic world plagued by natural diasters, Essun lives in a small comunity barricaded against the outside world. When her husband relizes that she and her children are orogenes with the ability to manipulate seismic energy, he kills their son and kidnaps their daughter. Against the backdrop of the end of the world, Essun follows, beginning an odyssey which will not end until her daughter is safe. Series: The broken earth ; 1 Jemisin, N. K. Broken earth ; 1. Subjects: Volcanic eruptions -- Fiction. Mothers and daughters -- Fiction. Psychokinesis -- Fiction. Genre: Fantasy fiction. Apocalyptic fiction. Other Title: 5th season Notes: Library Journal, 061515, p. 64 Publisher's Weekly,062915 Publisher's Weekly Best Books, 110215, p. 36 Kirkus Review - Adult,010101 LCCN: 2015002138 ISBN: 9780316229296 (trade pbk.) 0316229296 (trade pbk.) * 9780316229302 (e-book) * 9781478900832 (audio book download) Other Number: 900869607 System Availability: 2 # Local items: 1 Call Number: FA Jemisin, N Fifth se # Local items in: 0 # System items in: 1 Current Holds: 0 Place Request Add to My List Expand All | Collapse All Where is it? Suggestions and more Fiction/Biography Profile Genre FantasyFictionScience fiction Topics MothersDystopiasMurder investigationsMissing personsBetrayalCatastrophe Large Cover Image Trade Reviews New York Times ReviewFANTASY NOVELS OFTEN provide a degree of escapism: a good thing, for any reader who has something worth escaping. Too often, though, that escape comes through a fictional world that erases rather than solves the more complex problems of our own, reducing difficulty to the level of personal struggle and heroism, turning all obstacles to monsters we can see and touch and kill with a sword. But N.K. Jemisin's intricate and extraordinary world-building starts with oppression: Her universes begin by asking who is oppressing whom, what they are gaining, what they fear. Systems of power stalk her protagonists, often embodied as gods and primeval forces, so vast that resistance seems impossible even to contemplate. When escape comes in her novels, it is not a merely personal victory, or the restoration of a sketchy and soft-lit status quo. Her heroes achieve escape velocity, smashing through oppressive systems and leaving them behind like shed skins. The world is ending in Jemisin's new novel, "The Fifth Season," in ways from small to large and fast to slow, yet that's not such a bad thing, because the world is the enemy of the story: Father Earth as an antagonist whose unending cycle of destruction is all the more terrible for its faceless, insensate nature. The planet's oppression of its inhabitants parallels their own systematic oppression of the orogenes, mutants whose power to subdue the violent earth - at a cost - evokes the fear and hatred of the humans around them, and the hunger to make use of them. The lives and minds and bodies of the orogenes are trampled and exploited by their civilization as casually as the planetary crust shudders open a new volcano: a similarly impersonal cruelty that in both cases leads inevitably to the fifth season of death and destruction. "The Fifth Season" brings us to the end of the world in three different times, with three orogene women at different stages of life and loss. Their stories begin with the ending of their own worlds: the child Damaya as she is taken from her home to be trained to serve her empire; the prickly and resentful Syenite as she is sent on a mission that uncovers the brutal truths of her life's work; and the older Essun, living in hiding, as she discovers her husband has murdered their young son and taken their daughter. Essun's story, told in the present, begins in the moment of the larger cataclysm and is the most intimate; her agony and its second-person voice demand our close sympathy. All three narratives are urgent and deftly interwoven to reveal their far-future earth, a world that has buried our own civilization and many others in its lower strata. In this world, social oppression is an irresistible and natural force, but nature isn't seen through a green-colored wash of sentiment. Nature is trying to kill you and every other living thing, is going to kill you, now or in a century or in a thousand years. Yet there is no message of hopelessness here. In Jemisin's work, nature is not unchangeable or inevitable. "The Fifth Season" invites us to imagine a dismantling of the earth in both the literal and the metaphorical sense, and suggests the possibility of a richer and more fundamental escape. The end of the world becomes a triumph when the world is monstrous, even if what lies beyond is difficult to conceive for those who are trapped inside it. NAOMI NOVIK is the author, most recently, of the novel "Uprooted."Library Journal ReviewIn a world plagued by cataclysmic tectonic activity, the only way to survive is to constantly prepare for the next fifth season. But no one is ready for the scope of the disaster that strikes when the capital city of a continent-wide empire is subsumed in a massive rift that spreads hundreds of miles. Using alternating points of view, Jemisen explores the lives of several characters in the years leading up to the cataclysmic disaster. -VERDICT Multiaward winner Jemisen breaks uncharted ground with this long-awaited title that introduces a fresh world and trilogy, creating a completely realized society inhabited by three varieties of humans and a nonhuman species that lives inside the earth. With Jemisen's record of prestigious literary honors, plus her strong following, this is a must-buy for all speculative fiction collections and an excellent recommendation for fans of Brandon Sanderson's "Mistborn" trilogy.-JM © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.Publishers Weekly ReviewHumans struggle to survive on a ruined world in this elegiac, complex, and intriguing story, the first in the Broken Earth series from acclaimed author Jemisin (the Inheritance Trilogy). The Stillness is a quiet and bitter land, sparsely populated by subsistence communities called comms. Essun lived quietly in a comm with her husband and children until her secret got out: she-and her children-are orogenes, those who have the ability to control Earth forces. They can quell or start earthquakes, open veins of magma, and generally cause or rein in geological chaos. Authorities keep a brutal hold on orogenes, controlling everything about their lives, including whom they breed with. Those who escape servitude and seek safety in the comms face expulsion and execution at the hands of the fearful. Soon after Essun's secret is revealed, her husband kills their son, and her daughter goes missing. Essun sets off to find the girl, undertaking a journey that will force her to face unfinished business from her own secret past. Jemisin's graceful prose and gritty setting provide the perfect backdrop for this fascinating tale of determined characters fighting to save a doomed world. Readers hungry for the next installment will also find ample satisfaction in rereading this one. Agent: Lucienne Diver, Knight Agency. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved. Summary At the end of the world, a woman must hide her secret power and find her kidnapped daughter in this "intricate and extraordinary" Hugo Award winning novel of power, oppression, and revolution. (The New York Times) This is the way the world ends. . .for the last time. It starts with the great red rift across the heart of the world's sole continent, spewing ash that blots out the sun. It starts with death, with a murdered son and a missing daughter. It starts with betrayal, and long dormant wounds rising up to fester. This is the Stillness, a land long familiar with catastrophe, where the power of the earth is wielded as a weapon. And where there is no mercy. Read the first book in the critically acclaimed, three-time Hugo award-winning trilogy by NYT bestselling author N. K. Jemisin. 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