Essun is in Castrima, struggling to understand how to save the world. The Obelisk Gate also maintains The Fifth Season’s structure of using three point-of-view characters however, unlike book one, where all three POV characters were actually the same person-Essun-in different stages of her life, The Obelisk Gate features three different individuals for its points of view: Essun, her daughter Nassun and a man named Schaffa. The Fifth Season boldly opened with the end of the world, but that means that The Obelisk Gate has to make do with the world that has stubbornly persisted. She is reconciling what she learned in the previous book and trying to figure out a way to deal with the newly broken world in which she lives. This book features Essun, the hero of book one, The Fifth Season, settling into her new community of Castrima.

Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, is no exception to this rule (for a detailed look at book one, click here).

It is the characters dealing with the events of book one and preparing for the action of book three. Stuck in between these walloping crescendo moments, book two usually falls much flatter. It is almost inevitably a bridge between what was surely a cliffhanger-heavy but ultimately satisfying climax to book one-because no publisher is going to print a 500-page first-book-of-a-trilogy that does not have some decisive storytelling-and the ultimate finale to the trilogy, which is also surely momentous. Readers of the fantasy genre often dread the second book of a trilogy.

The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin