The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin

“Alas: in the Stillness, destroying mountains is as easy as an orogene toddler’s temper tantrum. Destroying a people takes only a bit more effort.”

Now this is how you write a sequel.
Jemisin has done it again. This series is simply spectacular.

“It’s not hate that you’re seeing. Hate requires emotion. What this woman has simply done is realize you are a rogga, and decide that you aren’t a person, just like that. Indifference is worse than hate.”

The Obelisk Gate picks up where The Fifth Season ended. After having lost her daughter’s ‘trace’ Essun, alongside her traveling companions, stays is in Castrima, an underground comm. Here she is reunited with Alabaster who has a task for her. However, his failing health and their strained relationship further complicate things. The comm’s headwoman is an orogene, Ykka, tries her hardest to make her comm safe and a place in which orogenes and stills can coexist peacefully. Threats from the outside however create discord among Castrima’s residents, risking a divide between orogenes and stills. Essun’s presence does not help matters as she is an extremely powerful orogene who is dealing with some serious trauma.

While The Fifth Season is more of an epic edge-of-your-seat fantasy, The Obelisk Gate is much more of a slow-burn. Jemisin expands the world she established in the first instalment and offers perspectives outside of Essun’s. We get chapters following Nassun, Essun’s ‘lost’ daughter, and Schaffa, Essun’s former Guardian. Although I certainly felt sympathetic towards Nassun, she also frustrated the hell out of me as she was willing to love two violent men but not her mother (or at least, she often professes that she resents her mother for having trained her incessantly). Still, the sections that focus on Nassun and Schaffa certainly present readers with a lot food for thought. Nassun’s devotion to her father, in spite of the fact that he murdered her younger brother, and to Schaffa are sadly all too believable. Her father’s repulsion and hatred towards orogene also calls to mind our world’s hatred towards the ‘other’.

Jemisin is a wordsmith and her prose has me in her thrall. Her dialogues not only ring true to life (in spite of the story’s fantastical setting) but they convey a scene’s atmosphere (tension, sadness, unrest). Jemisin’s narration is clever and always manages to surprise me. I love her fast-paced sequences in which characters are fighting for their lives or using their powers, and the slower-speed ones in which characters are talking about the past or the future or their feelings. Her writing style is utterly captivating. It can be playful or direct, descriptive and sophisticated or urgent and impressionistic (with fragmented sentences that perfectly capture a character’s trauma or fear). You cannot not pay attention to her words.

My review cannot really do justice to what Jemisin has created. This series has an intricate and complicated world and the author does not shy away from challenging each and every character’s view of what is best for it. There are no good or bad guys here.
The Obelisk Gate makes for an immersive high fantasy experience one that for all its magical elements presents with an all too real look into a divide and dying world.

my rating: ★★★★★

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