This is one of the hardest reviews I ever wrote because there's so much I love about it I don't know where to start. The Fifth Season is one of the mos beautiful and emotionally devastating books I've ever read, full stop. What an incredible, amazing book.

The Fifth Season is one of those books I both wanted to devour and savor. A book I couldn't stop reading but I also wanted to read slowly because I didn't want it to end. My interest in it was originally because of how critically acclaimed it was. I wanted to know more about the book everyone's talking about. I was not disappointed.

First, the world-building. The world-building in The Fifth Season was incredibly lush and portrays the world in a way that's both realistic and fantastic. I got a real sense of what The Stillness is like and how it must feel to live in such a place. The usage of slurs like "rogga" to refer to the orogenes felt like it should be- an insult, a dehumanizing term. When Alabaster took back the term to refer to himself and the other orogenes, I felt that the stonelore and the snippets of the lore painted for me more clearly a picture of their society and how it works.

There are "three" characters we follow throughout the course of the novel. The first one is Essun who we follow through a second-person point-of-view. She is a middle-aged mother of two who has managed to hide her orogeny in a small village for years. At the start of the book, her husband kills her son because of his orogeny and she goes after him in search of his daughter. I won't reveal more but I found Essun's story to be the most devastating and emotional. As she goes on this journey, I also saw that she has PTSD and has to cope with that.

Damaya's story is that of a young orogene in the Fulcrum still coming to terms with the fact that she's part of a people who are oppressed and hated by the majority. I liked how it was made clear that the Fulcrum is not a school, nor is it as safe haven any more than it is a prison for orogenes where they become tools.

Syenite. I love how her first chapter's title was "Syenite, cut and polished." To me, it meant that this was a woman who had survived her training, she's already earned her rings and she's ready to show what she can do. That's why I really felt for her when [spoilers!] she was forced to have a child with her mentor, Alabaster. Her arc and her journey was actually my favorite as I see her struggle and deal with it.  I understood and symphatized with her character best which was why I also kind of see why she did what she did at the end because while it was horrific, the alternative was far worse.

The writing is lyrical and evocative. I'm a sucker for good prose and N.K. Jemisin's prose is fantastic. Her use of second person in the Essun chapters was done incredibly well and it definitely fit the tone. Speaking of the book's tone, there is an underlying sense of quiet anger simmering below the surface of the entire book. While I was reading, I felt how tired and angry the characters are.

I don't want to spoil more of the plot than I already have but as I said, this is basically the story of Essun through the last and worst world-changing cataclysm. What this ultimately leads on, I'm excited to find out.