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. ... 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.

In N. K. Jemisin's new novel, The Fifth Season, the payoff is astounding. Sure, there's a whopping glossary at the end of the book — two of them, actually — but that simply underscores how much sumptuous detail and dimensionality she's packed into her premise ... The Fifth Season isn't a straightforward book any more than it's an upbeat one, but it's stronger for that. And Jemisin maintains a gripping voice and an emotional core that not only carries the story through its complicated setting, but sets things up for even more staggering revelations to come in future installments of the series ... With The Fifth Season, Jemisin brilliantly illustrates the belief that, yes, imaginative world-building is a vital element of fantasy — but also that every character is a world unto herself.

...perspective shifts effectively place the reader into Essun’s shoes, conveying her grief, anger, and triumph firsthand, rather than observing from the sidelines in a third-person perspective, or having the character tell you events in the first person. It’s a monumentally difficult task (and the shifts in perspective do mean that the The Fifth Season takes some getting used to), but it’s an incredibly effective tactic, allowing Jemisin not only to tell you the dangers of marginalization, enslavement, or oppression, but to let the reader experience it all through through the eyes of her characters.

I’m not a fan of tragedies, and this book is a great big mass of tragedy, so much so that I wonder if there will ever be a happily ever after, but oh well, it’s still interesting ... I won’t say that I really like her characters (sometimes I do), they’re sort of hard to connect with. They’re also somewhat distant though I do sympathise with them. They have, from the beginning of their lives, been brutalized emotionally, manipulated and controlled ... The novel is not exactly beautiful, more like brutal and painful, like their world itself but I will also say that never once, was it ever boring.

The Fifth Season contains many elements which are brought together skilfully by Ms Jemisin. Points of view span different times and places but never become confusing; little seeds promising future events fully come to bloom later on; the world feels fresh and interesting and there is always more to discover beyond the next turn ... Perhaps my favourite element of The Fifth Season is its acknowledgement that human nature is not simple ... [The] emotional reaction of pushing back against discrimination of orogenes subtly points back to racial Othering. However, because that anxiety and tension is displaced onto a category of people which does not exist in our reality, it allows all people who feel like they have ever been excluded from society to identify with the plights of these characters. This is truly very well done – I can’t imagine it being handled more skilfully by any other writer. Perhaps the only element that was missing for me was an emotional connection with the characters. A tighter connection would have catapulted this book from 'wow, this is great!' to an all-time favourite. As it stands, The Fifth Season was everything I was looking for when I asked for diverse fantasy recommendations, and I can’t wait to read the rest of the series.

Jemisin...is utterly unflinching; she tackles racial and social politics which have obvious echoes in our own world while chronicling the painfully intimate struggle between the desire to survive at all costs and the need to maintain one’s personal integrity. Beneath the story’s fantastic trappings are incredibly real people who undergo intense, sadly believable pain. With every new work, Jemisin’s ability to build worlds and break hearts only grows.

Humans struggle to survive on a ruined world in this elegiac, complex, and intriguing story ... 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.