I think this is the fastest I have ever inhaled a trilogy, except for times when I was sick in bed as a child. I wish I could give this a six out of five. I'm going tot discuss my take on the entire trilogy here in this review, and there will be spoilers. With me, there are always spoilers. But here, I can't separate spoilers from talk of technique and structure, so I won't bother even trying.

I tend to be leery of present tense narratives, or things that slide around with a second person perspective. I have seen too many things that are poorly written just use said things as a gimmick. Here, that is clearly not the case. Jemisin uses viewpoint very precisely; though it isn't revealed until the 3rd book-- huge spoiler-- the entire narrative is a first person account (Hoa) delivered to a second person listener (Essun) about that which she may have forgotten or been detached from during her transformation. I want to emphasize this, because Jemisin carries this off even in her prologue in The Fifth Season; it isn't just to orient the reader, it's to orient her newly hatched main character. Looking back there is no faltering of this tone and voice, but it works on so many levels. While Hoa narrates to Essun about her time as Essun, it's always "you"; when he narrates what he has learned or known of Essun when she went by other names, when she, in effect, was other people at different points in her life, he describes them as "she" in third person. By the end of the first book, what this accomplishes is a drawing apart and then drawing together of Essun as a character, the idea that trauma and oppression makes you into different people, that there is a "before" that happened to another person, and an "after" which happened/is happening to you is not only directly and narratively addressed, but it's underscored and pinned deep at the center of it all by Jemisin's use of this shifted third/second person narration. It made the emotionally difficult read utterly heartbreaking. Bloody masterful.

Then there is the fact that Jemisin takes into scope the personal and the societal in terms of abuse and oppression and gives us what is ultimately a possibility for hope. She doesn't flinch from showing us how hard it is to come to such a place, or the human effort it may take to get there. She doesn't flinch from describing brutality, but doesn't rub it in like salt and grit in a wound. She doesn't downplay empathy or moments of caring, because those are what makes her characters (and us, her readers) human. They are intermixed with the abuses her characters inflict upon one another, because this is what caring looks like under oppression. She shows us how humans become masterful at inflicting the abuse and oppression that they are subject to, but also that this does not preclude love and caring. Rather, it is intermixed because humans are complex and their relationships are complicated. She also shows us how one can make a choice to continue under that, or make something new. And that was the part that shook me to my core.

On a very personal level, I connected so much with Nassun; her character and that narrative arc threw light on so many old family wounds and so much personal pain over my relationship with my mother, and the abuse inflicted on her as a child, and how that affected my own childhood. It hurt like rebreaking and setting a bone that had healed wrong.

And what I love most about Jemisin is that she never once shies away from showing us what's at stake. Death is for keeps, and loss is very real. Because in a narrative like this, it has to be. Because the story doesn't work otherwise. Because there is not possibility for real change unless you are really aware of what can happen.

In the end, all I can tell you is: this is real nourishment. This is another series of books that changed me. And I am deeply, deeply grateful.