The Fifth Season
RECOMMENDED: The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin is $1.99! This is a Kindle Daily Deal and it’s being price-matched! Elyse loved this book and gave it an A:
The Fifth Season is also a relatively quick read. It opens with a cataclysmic disaster and doesn’t slow down its pace. Its characters travel widely. My only word of warning is that the book ends on a massive cliffhanger. Fortunately the sequel, The Obelisk Gate, will be released in August. After finishing this book I’m making desperate grabby hands for the next one.
If you like immersive, action-driven fantasy and if you want a fantasy world that’s not Euro-centric–or if you just love a really, really good story–I cannot recommend The Fifth Season enough.
This is the way the world ends. Again.
Three terrible things happen in a single day. Essun, a woman living an ordinary life in a small town, comes home to find that her husband has brutally murdered their son and kidnapped their daughter. Meanwhile, mighty Sanze — the world-spanning empire whose innovations have been civilization’s bedrock for a thousand years — collapses as most of its citizens are murdered to serve a madman’s vengeance. And worst of all, across the heart of the vast continent known as the Stillness, a great red rift has been been torn into the heart of the earth, spewing ash enough to darken the sky for years. Or centuries.
Now Essun must pursue the wreckage of her family through a deadly, dying land. Without sunlight, clean water, or arable land, and with limited stockpiles of supplies, there will be war all across the Stillness: a battle royale of nations not for power or territory, but simply for the basic resources necessary to get through the long dark night. Essun does not care if the world falls apart around her. She’ll break it herself, if she must, to save her daughter.
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RECOMMENDED: The Rook by Daniel O’Malley is a Kindle Daily Deal at $1.99! Carrie loves the series, especially the sequel Stiletto. It’s urban fantasy set in London with a badass cast of characters. But some found the book to have a lot of info-dumping. Have you read The Rook?
“The body you are wearing used to be mine.” So begins the letter Myfanwy Thomas is holding when she awakes in a London park surrounded by bodies all wearing latex gloves. With no recollection of who she is, Myfanwy must follow the instructions her former self left behind to discover her identity and track down the agents who want to destroy her.
She soon learns that she is a Rook, a high-ranking member of a secret organization called the Chequy that battles the many supernatural forces at work in Britain. She also discovers that she possesses a rare, potentially deadly supernatural ability of her own.
In her quest to uncover which member of the Chequy betrayed her and why, Myfanwy encounters a person with four bodies, an aristocratic woman who can enter her dreams, a secret training facility where children are transformed into deadly fighters, and a conspiracy more vast than she ever could have imagined.
Filled with characters both fascinating and fantastical, THE ROOK is a richly inventive, suspenseful, and often wry thriller that marks an ambitious debut from a promising young writer.
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Knight by Kristen Ashley is $1.99! This is an erotic contemporary romance and, if you love mega Alpha heroes, Ashley is for you. It’s angsty, dark, and the hero is domineering and brooding. These traits definitely divided readers, but the book retains a 3.9-star rating on Goodreads.
Anya Gage has learned that to get anything good in life, you have to work for it. She has no expectations, no dreams.
Then she finds herself at a party where she doesn’t want to be and she meets Knight.
Knight Sebring knows who he is, what he wants and what he likes. And he gets it. But he never expected something as sweet as Anya Gage to wander into his bedroom during a party he did not expect to be having to borrow his phone.
Knight tries to leave Anya to the life she deserves of white picket fences and a man who watches football on Sundays – good, normal and clean. But when Anya comes to his nightclub and finds herself in a situation, he knows someone has to look after her, he can’t fight it anymore and he decides that man will be him.
Knight teaches Anya that, just as with the bad, in life you should also expect the good. And he teaches her this by giving it to her.
But Knight has a dark past and just as he desires Anya for exactly who she is, he fears when she finds out exactly the man he has become and always intends to be, she’ll leave him for good, normal and clean.
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Private Affair by Rebecca York is $1.99! This is the third book in the Rockfort Security romantic suspense series, but it can be read as a standalone. While the mystery and suspense elements of the book were great, there were readers who found the romance to be lacking.
Olivia Winters and Max Lyon knew each other way back when, but she was one of the cool kids, and he was a bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks. Olivia’s a successful model now, and Max a PI much in demand.
When Olivia’s old high school friend is murdered-and a raft of “accidental” deaths may be murders, too-Max is the only man Olivia can trust to help her investigate.
As they team up, Max is blown away by Olivia’s courage under fire, and Olivia finds that the bad boy she remembers from the fringes of her social circle might just be the best man she’s ever met.
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Irresistible by Mary Balogh is $1.99 on Amazon, it’s the third book in the Horseman trilogy.
I’m glad I didn’t get around to The Fifth Season until late July last year. Of course, now there’s the long wait (okay, just until August, but it feels longer) for book three.
I really did love “The Rook” in a couldn’t put it down way, which is unfortunate because it’s, like, 500 pages. I’d agree that it takes a while to adjust to the style because a lot of it feels like needless info-dump. However, once I started treating the “info-dump” sections as more of a chance for a character to write a memoir it bothered me less.
I have Stiletto checked out from the library, and I can’t wait to get into it, but I’ve got to get passed two academic books first.
I read Jemisin’s Inheritance Trilogy for the first time last year and was greatly impressed. I’ve had The Fifth Season on my Kindle for ages, but I want to wait for a while, so I can go seamlessly into the second book. Thinking proactively! 🙂
Loved The Rook. Stay through the beginning and you will be hooked. Stiletto excellent as well. Now waiting on the next…
I cannot believe The Fifth Season is on sale for $1.99!
HAZEL – the second book, Obelisk Gate, is out so you can go seamlessly through them. It’s the third and final one that comes this summer. It will give me an excuse to reread the others.
Forgive me for a long post – but this is part of what I said about #2, Obelisk Gate, at my private FB page – and it’s applicable to The Fifth Season too. Even if it seems like it’s way out of your normal style, I would encourage people to buy this for $1.99.
OBELISK GATE by NK Jemisin – amazing, superb continuation of the other-world (but maybe not so other?) series begun with The Fifth Season. If you want to see Leslie Jones ice Milo Yannopoopyhead, READ THIS. If you watch SNL and want Leslie Jones to come out during one of Alex Baldwin’s skits and just rip the hair off, light it on fire and then burn down the entire freaking continent because some clueless tweeting moron just beat her son to death – this book. (That’s a mash up of SNL and this series, not something that happened to Jones).
If sometimes your 40-something woman self is angry and you’re not sure why because you shouldn’t be this angry things seem fine you should be happy because you should be right? – this is YOUR BOOK. If you think To Kill a Mockingbird is a classic book about racism – I DARE YOU TO READ THIS. If you thought Hidden Figures was an amazing movie, and you can’t believe how those women kept working to do what they loved and surmounted everything – READ THIS, because it’s the story of the Other Woman, the one who took the other route – be grateful the women at NASA didn’t break your continent in half, topple your cities and send nuclear winter to your planet for two centuries. Because – this is how it goes if a group is not given the same status as “people.” (In a pivotal scene she vaporizes a ballot box and says, basically, “You don’t get to vote on who can be people.”)
And that’s the thought to hold on to: You don’t get to vote on who can be people.
@Anna Richland: Wow. Thank you.
I’m going to start the first one now.
I was physically unable to read The Rook. You can only have so much italicized text before the words start to smear across the screen, and those infodumping letters went on for pages.