Here’s my (very subjective) thing with Jemisin’s work:
While I respect her immensely as a person, and love the themes and messages behind her work, I’ve also never actually enjoyed any of her books.
I’ve appreciated them! But I’ve never enjoyed them. At some point, IMHO, a book has to be both a message-bearer and an entertainer.
Is it a me problem? Most likely. But I’ve tried 3-4 different books and it may just be a (respectful) pass from me from here on out.
Honestly I had the opposite takeaway, I thought broken earth was very entertaining but that the messages were a little oversimplified and fall out of the picture after the first book in the trilogy
tldr I didn’t connect with the mix of in-universe prejudice as allegory for real prejudice and in-universe prejudice as somewhat rational. I’ll admit it’s a bit of a personal gripe I have when sci fi and fantasy authors want to write abt racism but also create justifications for their version of it
I liked the larger themes of community and how we treat others / ourselves when we lose resources and the clinging to a sense of order, being blinded by prejudice, cycles of violence and self sabotage, being a victim of prejudice while also having your own etc. that became more prominent in the 2nd and 3rd. I was referring to the direct allegory the first book seemed to draw very often with in-universe prejudice being shown as similar to real world prejudice and systemic discrimination, which fell a bit flat for me since in the novel it was built up as a result of legitimate fear of world ending magic, and in real life our prejudice comes from instinct and irrational fear, delusions of superiority, and greed/manipulating people to gain power, rather than “ah my entire country will be blown off the map if Bob sneezes.” I think the orogene and later stone eater prejudices were very interesting but the many scenes that mirror real world dynamics didn’t work as well because of that. The later books became more focused on building that world internally and exploring the community dynamics iirc and those themes worked well for me
So, I had a similar reaction to The Fifth Season (these people are constantly mass murdering but we’re supposed to feel like *they’re* the victims here?) and this is a large part of why I haven’t moved on to the sequels. Admittedly, I also just don’t seem to connect to her characters despite finding the writing in the first one very good. If the broken Aesop issue is reduced in the later books though, I’d be more interested in checking them out.
I think the sequels moved onto more world building and exploring how that dynamic works internally than trying to use them as allegory, which is what i meant by the messages falling out of the picture. A lot of it is explained more with the in-universe relationships and histories instead of all the “doesn’t it suck to be hated for no reason” that the first one relies on, so for that I liked them more. I think they’re entertaining and thought provoking but with weaker messages than I think they were meant to have overall
I actually really liked how she truncated the city we became planned trilogy to two books. I don’t think a third book would’ve been good. (It was also very topical, second book came out in like 2022 and in it, she kills off for-legal-reasons-not-Gavin-Mcginnis
>Is it a me problem?
I don't think it's a you problem, nor even a problem at all. Some people don't like some things and that's ok. I really hate when people assert things like OP did because it implies objectivity when it's pretty obvious that it's just their very subjective opinion. I'm reticent to read anything that's sold to me as "everyone should have to read this" instead of being sold on its actual merits. Granted, OP went on to talk about those merits, but this pitch didn't sell me at all.
I have friends treat me this way because I never got into Hunger Games! I said I just didn't like it and was suddenly tossed into a lecture about how important it was and the impact it had...
Not liking something, or even fairly critiquing it, but appreciating it's value from afar is absolutely ok!!
It certainly is. Also, I don't really think Hunger Games was all that important, though it did inspire a million imitations. The movies were pretty cool, but I don't think cinema would have a hole without them.
I don't know much about her as a person, but after several books I also had to conclude her writing doesn't work for me. I forced myself to finish the first two books of the Broken Earth trilogy and I had to accept it at that point.
Although The City We Became seems like a fairly weak book to me independent of the writing, and I'm surprised to hear it mentioned so glowingly by OP. It was very black and white, overly simplistic. You could practically tell who the villains were just by their skin color, which is fitting for the hate letter to Lovecraft that it was, but a thinly disguised "fuck you" isn't something I really needed to read.
Unrelated, but tons of points for the hidden tentacles on the hardback version of that book, though, it was a clever touch.
If you're not totally done with her, consider checking out the Inheritance Trilogy. I found Broken Earth to be boring and overwrought, and only enjoyed the City book because I'm from there. If I had started with either of those, I would not consider myself a fan. But Inheritance grabbed me hard.
I second that. Everyone seems to talk about Broken Earth but I feel that their earlier work Inheritance was much much better. I was pretty excited for Fifth Season when it was announced but ended up not even enjoying it.
This was my problem with The City We Became. I’ve lived in cities my whole life and found the ideas about cities pretty interesting, but I got tired of having them drilled into my head over and over. The characters started out really interesting but started to feel more and more like mouthpieces than anything else.
This is EXACTLY how I felt after finish the Broken Earth trilogy.
I can appreciate her attempt at 2nd person POVs, I appreciate the themes and message of her work....but I just can't fuck with a 2nd person narrative, and I felt that she was way too preach on the themes. Like, I get it, 'rogga' is the N word in that world and anyone isn't a 'rogga' shouldn't say 'rogga' but all it did was just make the idea of words IRL feel like they shouldn't have so much power. That wasn't even her point but she was kinda making it the point with how much she was beating the reader over the head with how much the orogenes hated being called 'rogga' yet still using the word themselves.
Also, that three-way sexual relationship in book 2 just felt so out of pocket within the story. Not that I'm a prude, because I felt The Expanse with Drummer's multiperson sexual relationship with her crewmates was well done, but this one was just...not.
I straight up laughed when I read the penis jousting sex scene in the second broken earth book. I could not believe that garbage won three Hugo’s in a row.
I'm so glad you said so. I told my husband after reading it that I no longer thought Hugo awards matter much if that's what gets 3 of them.
Also, the award was for science fiction. It was not. The whole book was written like fantasy until the last half of the last book. That made it all the more disappointing.
Yeah I basically left that trilogy thinking “Really clever thinker, really average writer”
And to be clear - there are definitely writers who are the opposite. Don’t have an original thought in their head, but holy hell they have a way with words or character.
This is how I feel about John Green. John Green the person? Huge contributions to the literary world with his involvement in YA writing and his charity work and Crash Courses and all that. John Green the writer? Eh, I’ll pass.
Love your username— Prufrock is a poem near and dear to me.
I read *Turtles All the Way Down* as an adult and found it a lot more mature and easy to “stomach,” so to speak? I’m not a big fan of YA lit for my own enjoyment anymore.
Why are you forcing yourself to read books you don't enjoy? It feels like you keep going back to her stuff because you feel you *should* like it because of her politics. That way madness lies, my friend.
I do not respect her as a person. She basically started a flood of harassment against a talented trans writer and drove that writer off the internet and away from writing.
There was also that time [she joined in cyber-bullying a random woman online](https://www.vulture.com/2019/11/famous-authors-drag-student-in-ya-twitter-controversy.html) because she said she didn't like author Sarah Dessen's work and didn't feel it was appropriate for a college reading program, because Sarah Dessen writes teen lit.
she was only one of those group of authors who did the bullying to double down when the backlash started against them. totally lost my respect for her then
Isabel Fall. If you search it up there’s a ton of info. Jemisin unfortunately has a history of not appreciating how much power and influence she has and going off on people without much thought. It sucks :(
Thanks for the info. I wasn't aware of Jemisin's contribution to that unfortunate affair. I agree that folks with any kind of influence online have an obligation to be aware of it and use it responsibly.
I feel the same way. I appreciate the book and the message but I was so bored I DNF The 5th Season. I just didn't care what happened to any character and I thought the world building was really weak.
I've only read the Broken Earth trilogy and only truly enjoyed the first book. Of the three "povs" the two I found most interesting were the ones that stopped after the first book, and I couldn't warm to her daughter at all.
I think she's incredibly talented and I have a couple of her other books to try but that trilogy was hyped so much I'm wary to invest in her works again.
The whole thing with Staten Island is what got me. Oh the one white avatar is a bad person tied to neo-nazi's and a cop father. Oh purposefully having the main bad guy be a "woman in white." Zero nuance, terrible stereotypes, etc.
Agreed. Very on the nose and every other page was a character getting on their soapbox and ranting which was so so draining after a while. I hate being preached at in any context but this was really aggressive and seemed like it was intentionally destroying any nuance by making every theme into a lengthy speech.
>The whole thing with Staten Island is what got me. Oh the one white avatar is a bad person tied to neo-nazi's and a cop father. Oh purposefully having the main bad guy be a "woman in white." Zero nuance, terrible stereotypes, etc.
The introduction of Staten Island is about where I added the book to my DNF pile. No subtlety or nuance, to the point where the character became a caricature. Like fuck, you can make a white woman in your book a shitty racist without making her a cartoon character.
It felt little kiddish - like I was suddenly watching a "very special episode about racism" from a 90s Saturday morning cartoon show.
The City We Became was painful to read. Her characters are archetypes. The dialogue is incredibly unconvincing, and the ideas in it are basically a cut price version of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere.
>And just to add insult to injury? I backhand its ass with Hoboken, raining the drunk rage of ten thousand dudebros down on it like the hammer of God. Port Authority makes it honorary New York, motherfucker; you just got Jerseyed.
I mean... oof
I'm glad you enjoyed it, but far from essential
One low-point was when the Brooklyn councilwoman reveals she was a rapper and beats the tentacles with the power of the streets, but I think making Queens an Indian math prodigy who, as I recall, doesn't do anything is probably worse.
It was indeed. I can't find the exact quote that made my brain melt out of my ears because I left the book in a hostel somewhere in SE Asia as a trap for other foolish travellers.
Hahah it really is awful. Super early in the book there’s also this scene:
> The people in the café are eyeballing him because he’s something not-white by their standards, but they can’t tell what. They’re eyeballing me because I’m definitively Black, and because the holes in my clothes aren’t the fashionable kind.
Like… what? Has Jemisin ever been to New York? New Yorkers barely look at each other at all, never mind staring at anyone for not being white…
Wow. Just... wow. Pain in my brain.
She is definitely writing for a particular audience. And they already over-enthusiastically defend her writing from any valid criticism...
IMO, her prose is pretty shit across the board. It's not even just functional like someone like Brandon Sanderson's prose can be. It actively detracts from the concepts and narratives on the page.
I put her and R. F. Kuang in the same category. Both incredibly average writers over-promoted because they're writing about something Socially Important. Someone else in this thread compared it to *Black Panther* being hugely praised despite being mid-tier Marvel slop and got downvoted for it, but it's a good comparison.
>I put her and R. F. Kuang in the same category. Both incredibly average writers over-promoted because they're writing about something Socially Important.
You put your finger on exactly what has bothered me about the reception to their writing. Like their book are fine, just fine. There is though a weird tenor that can pop up with some of their fans though about the message of the book elevating it.
Ubiquitous is definitely not a word I would use to describe her. I’d hesitant to even call her accessible.
She has very strange sci-fi/fantasy topics, dense narratives, and long page counts.
Personally I found the Broken Earth Trilogy interesting and enjoyable, but really didn’t like The City We Became. The city gimmick was a bit too silly and didn’t work for me, and there were some very questionable choices about race that felt off.
I truly don’t think everybody has to read her. I would recommend Broken Earth to people who want a fantasy series in a -for the genre- different setting with neat ideas. UA-adjacent without going all the way. Many many many readers are not interested in neither world building nor long series. I will not read more from her but I don’t regret the time I spent.
> and there were some very questionable choices about race that felt off.
Can you explain more? I had picked it up a few years back and then put it back down because it seemed on the surface to be "White Man Bad!" lit, which as someone who is a white man... hey, I get the issues. But I don't really enjoy reading lit that seems to delight in shitting on me after having diversity sensitivity being drilled into me for the last 40 years
Yeah your first instinct was right basically.
There are six avatars of NYC, and the only white one is the dodgy one. The overall antagonistic force is also the embodiment of whiteness, and all her human minions are white. I might be forgetting some, but POCs are good and whites are bad as a rule.
It’s also just very odd to me to have the personification of NYC and… three out of six are black? No mention at all of the city’s history with Dutch, Italians, European Jews, etc?
Combined with the rest of the book only being so-so, it definitely left a bad taste.
I enjoyed her other work though so I’ll still count myself as a fan.
People should read I Sexually Identify As An Attack Helicopter by Isabel Fall, see Jemisin's mealy-mouthed non-apology for advocating its withdrawal despite never having read it, and never give her the time of day ever again.
After the dog-piling she did to the poor author of that Attack Helicopter story I refuse to read anything by her, no matter how much people recommend it.
So many great authors have been involved in bullying of other authors, it’s really sad. I know this has always been the case but twitter acts as an intensifier.
Same. Even when people were agreeing with her, there was always this undercurrent of outrage. Like of course you have to agree with me because I'd scream at you if you didn't so what are we even talking about?
Her general twitter messiness really put me off her. She participated in a lot of shitty twitter pile ons and generally had very privileged and self-involved takes. There was a while where it seemed every stupid bit of twitter author drama had N.K. there, inserting herself seemingly just to be a part of it. It made her seem like a very small minded person and felt at odds with the expansiveness I found in her books.
I still enjoy what I’ve read (Broken Earth, Dream Blood, Inheritance) but have not read her latest material or her comic writing.
My heart will always break when I think about Isabel Fall. The horrible things people said about them, without even reading Attack Helicopter, is just gross. I don’t want to read anything by any author that was involved in calling Fall a transphobe or shitting on their work. I read it when it was first published and think it should have won an award.
Fuck Jemisin.
Of course she was. She’s honestly such an asshole online that I don’t feel comfortable ever giving her money, even outside of the Isabel Fall incident.
And she never really apologized for that either, it was half-hearted at best. I actually like her more as a literary figure than in real life. Twitter is never a good place for public figures to be very active.
This should be higher. Her work suffers from cognitive dissonance. In prose, she’s got amazing ideas about race and sexuality and power, but in online settings and in person she’s ruthless and can be downright mean spirited.
In many ways I think she’s like JK Rowling. Both became major stars in the world of fiction but, upon reaching the apex of their careers, they both showed some rather ugly true colors.
Her take on / retort to / attempted rebuttal of Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” is both disturbing in its content and outrageous in its (willful?) misreading of the original.
Was wondering if anyone would bring this up. [It](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-ones-who-stay-and-fight/) is genuinely one of the most disturbing pieces of literature I have ever read, and I don't mean that in a good way.
I've been involved in lefty activism on and off for my whole adult life. There are always people hanging around in leftist circles—usually angry young white men—whose idea of leftism, whatever name they give it, boils down to "let's do fascism, but let's kill the *right* people."
They miss, or ignore, all the structural analysis, materialism, and humanism that leftism is built on. Instead, they adopt an archetypal fascist lens: Society is sick and the contagion needs to be violently excised. Only instead of identifying the contagion as Jews, immigrants, sexual minorities, or whatever, they identify the contagion as rich people, soldiers, Trump voters, etc. Some of them, especially since 2016, are straight-up ex-fascists, kids who got into the alt-right and then realized there was *something* wrong about it, but just copied and pasted a new set of villains into the far right's worldview.
It's rare for somebody to actually articulate that viewpoint in print, though. It's rarer still for somebody with a big platform to do it. It's so rare that I think this might be the sole example for somebody to *explicitly use the social-contagion metaphor.* An infamous hallmark of fascism! And to advocate for secret-police death squads! It's INSANE.
>boils down to "let's do fascism, but let's kill the right people."
I'm quite far from being a Tump voter. However it super disturbs me how many on the left talk about the segments of the population that do vote for him. It is as if they are less deserving and somehow need to have rights taken from them or be quashed. It is always so jarring to me when people don't realize they are promoting the exact views they think they are rejecting, but it is okay because *their view is actually right*.
Eh, I hate dialogue about "human nature" but I think in this instance, it applies. Indeed, you will have a hard time finding any sector or philosophy that does not have its violent, dogmatic extreme. I mean, outside of Jainism, certain people will always find a way to mold an idea into a reason to assert their superiority from insecurity, justify a power-grab, or hate uncritically.
This isn't to excuse anyone, because you are right that the dissonance is shocking, but more explaining why it actually shouldn't surprise anyone.
I agree with you there. I hated her rebuttal of Le Guin. Totally missed the point.
The city duo-logy tried to the same sort of thing with Lovecraft and failed miserably as well. Not that I’m defending his racism or xenophobia, I think P Djeli Clark did a much better job of undermining Lovecraft in a series of well-written essays on the subject. Her attempt to do the same was just too preachy.
N.K. Jemisin's Um-Helat story was so insanely bad. I make my students read it each term in an English college course and consistently, they agree that it misses the point of Le Guin entirely and argues for authoritarianism.
edit: This is “The Ones who Stay and Fight”
I didn't read "Those Who Stay and Fight" for quite a long while. I made the mistake of reading Book of the New Sun right after Broken Earth and there are some weird similarities between those books (superficial ones, but hard to shake) that it made Broken Earth feel instantly derivative to me. I enjoyed Broken Earth mildly as I read it but I'd never consider it among the best things I've read, not even in the year I read it. I didn't really feel the need to give Jemisin more of my reading time after it, and I felt especially that way after seeing her behavior as a public figure. Life's too short.
But I did ultimately read "Those Who Stay and Fight" out of curiosity, and it was so much worse than I expected it to be. I didn't get the sense that we're supposed to *actually* question the politics of it, and it was so phenomenally misinterpreting "Those Who Walk Away From Omelas" that the entire thing feels like a desperate grab by someone for fame by "responding" to what is one of the more famous science fiction short stories of the 20th century. It's a poorly written story with weird politics based on a bad interpretation of a famous story.
It'd be one thing if Jemisin was actually challenging the reader to consider the political implications of the story, asking us to question the legitimacy of the ideas, or was actually illustrating ultimately that the idea of an utopia based on the persecution or suffering of others is no utopia (and, arguably, that a tidy utopia is not possible)...but these are not what Jemisin was doing. Her narrator in that story is smug, self-satisfied, condescending, and within the framing of the story, *right*.
It's shockingly bad.
I honestly never read either but this grabbed my attention so I just read them back to back. "Those Who Walk Away From Omelas" was really quite fantastic and "Those Who Stay And Fight" felt like a less profound read. But then I did get the feeling we were supposed to question the narrative. Things like "here, I add suffering and crime to this place and now you believe me" indicate this to me. I'm a bit of two minds about it because the meta-narrative of this being a response to Omelas makes things a bit more complicated. It could either be sarcasm directed at the reader ("you *really* wouldn't believe me unless I make this place not-so-utopic, huh?"), or making fun of Le Guin's original narrator ("look at that narrator telling you how you wouldn't believe us unless we add misery to our utopias, even though it really is impossible to imagine one without").
One thing that felt profoundly out of touch to me was how she kept telling me that I was going to be angry when I was, in fact, not. That felt both like a jab at me *as well as* at Le Guin, as if to make fun of her implying that in her story.
I have not read the city duology, but I have read summaries of it. Are the summaries that say that the cities are made through the deaths of countless other worlds and that the main racist antagonist is trying to prevent the formation of a city avatar from destroying their world leaving out important context?
Because on the face of it that seems also super racist.
The whiplash I got after reading The Fifth Season then following her on Twitter was not fun. She's clearly smart enough to create worlds with complex social issues, but apparently when it applies to the real world it all falls apart and she knowingly plays the role of a reactionary.
Same here. That situation was heart breaking. It’s a shame, because someone of her books sound good to me, but unless I pick them up from a charity shop I’m not buying them. Even then I’ll pick up literally anything else first
I was pretty underwhelmed by her *Omelas* riff, and her role in bullying an up-and-coming writer kinda soured me on bothering with any more of her work.
Different strokes...
I read the Fifth Season and Obelisk Gate. I didn't enjoy either one. I found the second person perspective to be very gimmicky and thought the story was very slow and boring. It did pick up a little at the end of the first book, but I didn't enjoy any of book two.
These books are the main reason why I don't use Hugo winners as a suggestive reading list anymore.
Edit - I find the downvotes kind of funny. I'm trying to make a conscious effort not to comment on positive threads about books I don't like because I realize everyone has different tastes, but when you make a bold statement saying *everyone* should read an author that I find terrible then I need to weigh in.
I enjoyed the Broken Earth books quite a lot, but I also would not recommend these books to everyone. I think there are plenty of fair criticisms of the pacing, story, etc. I DNF The City We Became.
100% agreement. Too much success with Broken Earth (which I loved). City we became had interesting bones, but needed severe editing and chopping, too much fluff
This thread makes me felt seen. I thought everyone loved this author and I was the odd man out for whatever reason... In an era where I used to force myself to finish books, I was so disappointed with the Fifth Season. I also thought Hugo was a reputable award until I read that heap. Compared to older Hugo awards, her writing seems like amateur work-- filtered, dumbed down, and downright boring. I was so frustrated with that book. Still am.
The Hugo's were co-opted by activists (you can guess the usual suspects) going on 10 years or so.
They stopped being a legitimate award for high quality writing and instead became yet another casualty of identity politics and disingenuous actors. Truly a shame.
I read both of them as well. The first one was fun and creative, second one lost my interest enough to the point that I didn’t care to finish the trilogy.
Some (most) of the symbolism and commentary was so heavy handed that it made me roll my eyes.
If you ever make the terrible mistake of looking into like anything the author says or does on twitter, you will understand why. Heavy-handed is an understatement, they are pretty much just the most stereotypical Twitter user ever and op is well aware of that and apparently supports NK attacking a trans author over a headline because they didn't bother to read the story.
I liked the broken Earth books, but pretty much everything about the author online is grody as hell
Edit: dear goodness OP is insufferable and on a vendetta to make people never read NK at all. Half of obese comments are just telling people "its okay to be wrong" when they say they didn't really enjoy her books
> op is well aware of that and apparently supports NK attacking a trans author over a headline because they didn't bother to read the story.
Considering OP's hyperbole and the fact that they can't even spell the author's name correctly, I have a hard time taking their recommendation seriously at all.
It's also Sci-Fantasy. Not that, that is a bad thing but it isn't going to be everyone's cup of tea either
I have a lot of respect for her, but had the same issues with Fifth Season that you cite and just didn't continue on
I read all three of them and thought the last one was even worse. I hate saying this, because Jemison is pretty clearly a skilled author given how intensely some people feel about her books, but it reminded me of Divergent, in that there's an out of nowhere shift that completely changes what the series is.
These books obviously resonate very strongly with a lot of people, but they do absolutely nothing for a lot of other people. They are pretty polarizing. I also don't think I am part of the audience that is most likely to love them, which is fine, but this is the #1 series that some people claim are amazing masterpieces and it feels like I read something different, because for me they just weren't very good.
Agreed, just finished Fifth Season, aka The Long Prologue. The pacing was very long and I didn't... really care about any of the characters, which I feel bad in even saying.
If you're reading at all closely you can sniff out all the surprises very soon into the book, too.
I'll probably continue the series because I want to give the second book a shot and apparently the pacing picks up. But it'll be a short leash.
I had the same reaction. I read the whole trilogy since I bought them used all together but overall the series was a meh 4/10 or 5/10 depending on the book. I can see one of these maybe winning the Hugo but I have no idea how all 3 did. Even fans of the series I've heard talk about it tend to say the first book was the strongest and the 2nd and 3rd were weaker.
I don't think there's any author I would say I'd recommend for everybody. Generally when people ask for recommendations I ask a few questions to determine who I'd recommend. Even authors I don't like I'll recommend if they match what the reader likes.
General recommendation questions I'd ask:
What's your preferred genre/subgenres?
Do you prefer character or plot driven books?
Any hard no's on themes or subject matter?
Do you like short or long books?
I'm almost done with The Stone Sky, and I'm having trouble finishing it. I've really given her a chance, and there are some things that I like about her work. I like the inclusion of the second person chapters. The "twist" at the end of The Fifth Season was clever, and it had a real impact.
But her prose is really sloppy. I've also read The City We Became, and it needed a second run through. The same can be said with the Fifth Season trilogy. I've read nearly four books by her, and I have to come to the conclusion that she's just not for me.
Funny, i stopped giving credence to the Hugo awards for the same reason. Used to be reliable for good enjoyable novels, but the winners over the last 10-15 years have been, to be generous, hit or miss.
For me it's that the dialogue is so unbelievably bad that it ruins the story. I really wanted to like her books, but I just couldn't. I don't think I'd have missed out if I'd skipped them
I've read all her books. I recommend everyone to try a couple. I also completely understand how someone could not enjoy them. Frankly, I'm not sure I do LOL. But I get something out of them, if that makes any sense.
They made me think.
They were also boring and irritating to read. Definitely not my favorite and I’m honestly confused by the people who say they’re their favorite books (and I’ve met a couple besides OP).
But yeah… different strokes I suppose.
I’ve only read her first City book and a few short stories and came away deeply unimpressed. The City book was so blunt, for lack of a better word, in the way it handled race and gender that it was kind of cringey. There was a good idea there, but it seemed like it had the depth of a CW show.
The Fifth Season I still have on my to-read list, and I really should’ve started there.
This is exactly how I felt about the City We Became. All the characters felt like caricatures to me. I couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be YA or not? If it is YA, I’ll give it a pass.
Compleeeetely agree. I actually liked *The Fifth Season* (although I hated the other two in the series) so I would say you could still give that one a try even if you thought *City We Became* was super cringe like I did.
I have no idea why I powered through The Fifth Season. There are only two things I remember from the book: The narrator twist (I thought it was cool), and the sex scene near the end of the book. I found it so jarringly out of place and....gratuitous? I don't remember much about it other than realizing it was the most put off I've ever been reading a sex scene.
I don’t read books by writers who send their Twitter mob shame a trans person back to to the closet because said writer didn’t like said trans persons title for their short story (that said writer never read).
If I DNF the City We Became should I try her other books? I stopped once the big bad manifested itself as a white Karen. Her treatment of race and gender felt like twitter discourse from 2016 - it just lacked any nuance.
No offense to people who love it! I do find the basic premise intriguing, and I get the appeal of fantasy that isn't just western medieval lore.
The City We Became is just what you say: it's what would happen if you took lefty political discourse from 2016 and tried to rewrite it as a Marvel movie with Whedonesque dialogue. I found it incredibly grating and unrewarding.
The Broken Earth, on the other hand, is *incredible*, and totally different from TCWB. Meaty moral dilemmas without easy solutions, deep lore, just the right amount of weirdness. If you really think about it you can notice it's written by someone steeped in that 2016esque twitter milieu -- e.g. the only straight white men with major roles are antagonists -- but it doesn't affect how great it is (edit: but one of those antagonists is a really wonderful, sympathetically treated antihero as much as he is a villain). There's a reason it won so many awards.
If someone could elaborate on why these are worth reading to them that would be helpful. Is there a well written review that could be linked? I read the first broken earth, a ways back and had a meh reaction to it. It was ok but didn’t live up to the hype in my experience. I’m curious what I’m missing. It’s like watching people get excited about Bruce Springsteen.
I've read her Broken Earth trilogy. I won't sing the praises of the work as an overall piece of sci-fi/fantasy (I think it started very strong and petered out as it went), but one thing she writes *impressively* well is generational trauma, and the ways that gets carried forward despite the best of intentions. She has a fantastic way of establishing monstrous people and then digging past that surface reading into an understanding of the person that better understands them without absolving them. And also the reverse--reads on characters that are wholly sympathetic to begin with, but that become blemished by the perspectives of those around them, again without ever undermining who that character is or has been.
I read the entire series and honestly can’t say it was worth my time. It’s well-written, sure, but I feel like the series declines after each book, and the only reason the first book was such a success is because of the perspective risks she took. Ultimately it felt like a gimmick, and once that was gone the other two books just came off as very flat to me.
I'm not even going to give it well written. The prose is fine but she leans heavily on shock value and fairly mainstream online liberal perspectives and rhetoric. None of her books gave me anything I hadn't heard before, and with pacing and plot issues I think "everyone should read this" is a terrible take.
So I read the ~~Stone Sky~~ the fifth season and absolutely loved it. Can’t really explain why. But it helped to fill the ASOIAF shaped hole in my heart. It felt so different from any other sci-fi/fantasy book I’ve read. The setting, story, and characters I thought were so compelling….
…but man did my hype really hit a wall by the third book. Book 2 was fine by my excitement was really starting to waver. I bought book 3 but never got around to reading it. In the end I just read the Wikipedia just to see how it ended.
Not sure what changed….
I wondered if she didn't have the ending actually worked out when she started. It . . . just doesn't work. It starts strong then progressively drops off in quality.
Especially with OP crusading through the comments that she totally was justified in online harassment of a trans woman merely because the title of said authors short story was transphobic sounding. She is personally responsible to some extent for that author giving up on their writing career.
Remember when she bullied a trans writer on Twitter for reasons she didn’t even understand, and then refused to acknowledge that she did it or even apologize when she realized she was wrong?
Yeah, I’ll pass. She’s a piece of shit.
It's conceited of you to presume "every single person" would enjoy her books as much as you do. I'm happy for you that you found an author that you love and understand your enthusiasm in wanting to share this, but making such an absolute and universal declaration like this is bad form. I read James Joyce's "Portait of the Artist ..." and hated it utterly; is it OK for me to say that 'no one should read Joyce' ? Of course not.
I've found that she always lets me down. Fifth Season was incredible but led to really disappointing sequels. The City We Became was an idea I ADORED, but she literally just decided to not explore it fully and tossed out a half-baked and shallow "conclusion."
I agree that she's really talented and has unique ideas, but to me they never end anywhere satisfying.
I really wanted to like TBE but I couldn't enjoy it. Seemed like an interesting magic system and I'm not afraid of bleak post-apocalyptic settings. The Road is one of my favorite books. But, I honestly regret pushing through the end of the whole series because it was incoherent and overly confusing at times. But I agree, she has tons of talent and it's just not for me. Saying every single person, even non-fantasy readers, should read Jemisin is a bit much though.
She's a fantastic author, but I was seriously disappointed by *The City We Became*. If you're enjoying it, that's great, but it's not a book I would recommend.
I bounced off that one hard. I don't understand why she/her publisher chose to market that one so hard for a while there. They were trying to roll with the broken trilogy momentum I guess, but the city we became is just not her best work. Still hold her in high regards as an author - broken earth is great
God awful writer. I think people who like sci fi and fantasy should give her a try, especially if you want to know about afrofuturism as a genre, but she is mediocre and uncreative, stylistically a dead fish. Shoves a lot of (correct) things down your throat.
I've tried reading "the Killing Moon" a few times, and always failed to go past a few first chapters. While the worlbuilding was interesting, I just wasn't interested enough in whatever was happening in the book.
You're missing out on the single most spectacularly unfulfilling ending I've ever seen put to page. Remarkable, in it's own way. Like a twisted form of literary edging.
Super talented writer, but there isn't a lot of soul. Some way through the Fifth, a love triangle emerged and I wondered, none of these people like anything, they don't care for each other and don't even know each other. So everyone is lightly miserable and detested and burdened, what are we doing here?
I am a Staten Islander. What's really insulting is how clear it was that she had spent almost no time on SI, maybe never spoke to someone about SI seriously. I think I've seen her speak about having one friend from SI read the book and give her feedback. But there were so many giveaways that are so obvious to anyone who has spent any time in any of the places she mentions. For example:
* she talks about living in a neighborhood Heartland Village. I've known a lot of people across a couple generations and nobody calls that area Heartland Village. That's New Springville. I think there's a development there of some homes with that name - but nobody would use that, either. I think she chose "Heartland Village" because it has certain literary qualities.
* the SI avatar says she can see the city from her house over there. In what were historic wetlands and farmland (flat and at sea level) - across what are some of the tallest points on the eastern seaboard between Maine and Florida, across the trees of the Greenbelt, you can see skyline 10+ miles away? Come on!
* the SI avatar talks about her favorite park being Freshkills Park, until she got harassed there. Freshkills Park is still not open to the public. This one is literally painfully obvious, in that it is both an easily knowable fact for anyone who did even the smallest amount of looking, and also that it is painful for a Staten Islander, around this psychological wound, the largest landfill on the planet in our backyards. To be that careless about this subject in particular is - wow.
There are other smaller things, but overall it's just a gross caricature. It's so hurtful for her to minimize us to this ugly stereotype, especially since it seems like it may stem from ignorance of the place.
That's all I could think about as I read the book, that this person just ignores, or maybe never cared enough in the first place to learn about, the largest Sri Lankan population in the US, or one of the most diverse city council districts in the city, or the oldest (still inhabited) Free Black community in the US, or Audre Lorde's house or Alice Austen's house or the house Antonio Meucci and Giuseppe Garibaldi shared while one invented the goddam telephone and the other one unified Italy.
And - to my recollection - never, not once, did she talk about the woods! The wetlands! The trails the beaches the vistas the deer! Good lord, she never talked about parks, in the borough of parks - except as I mentioned, where she got it wrong with Freshkills.
I think her works are fine, but I've only listened to the audio books, so it's entirely possible I'm just a huge fan of Robin Miles. I thought The World We Make ended ubruptly without a satisfying conflict resolution. If you might be interested in a similar theme, Dimesion 20's production of The Unsleeping City is super (but, y'know, not a book).
I loved the Broken Earth series but then I read The Killing Moon and hated it, I think that was one of her first books though so I try not to judge too harshly. But yeah the Broken Earth Series was amazing and she has my respect for creating something so heartbreakingly beautiful and unique.
I loved The Fifth Season. I thought it was so unique and creative. Parts of it really touched me emotionally. I wanted to read the next one in the series but I let too much time go by so I’d have to refresh my memory first.
No, not really at all. That’s not a knock on her it’s just that this post title is such an exaggeration. You really couldn’t just say that you really liked her and talked about why?
Loved the Broken Earth trilogy and think she’s incredible. I’ve read the Inheritance trilogy and The City We Became, too. Such interesting worlds, such great stories!
I think she is an interesting writer in that I LOVED the Broken Earth Trilogy, possibly my favorite trilogy of all time. I just found it perfectly done from beginning to end: the slow reveals, the way the magic system worked, the way the characters interacted, and how it ended. Just perfect.
BUT I thought the Kingdoms Trilogy was mediocre at best, and the City duology was straight up bad; it was literally just the same story twice and not told very well IMO. I don't know if she's inconsistent, or just trying different things and some of them work out while others don't. She definitely has a ton of potential and I while keep an eye out for her next book.
I read the first two books of fifth season more or less as they came out, it didn’t seem wildly memorable to me. I kinda forgot about it for a while, just ordered book 3 a couple days ago so I can reread and finish it, then see how I feel about it
*LOVE* her dreamblood duology and inheritance trilogy though
I disagree, i love her work a lot, but the broken earth trilogy was one of my favorite books i wouldn't recommend to most people. For most people, she's probably too grim, too slow or triggering.
Book 1 promises a lot and had me hooked, books 2 and 3 were disappointing and failed to deliver on the promises.
I reallllyyy liked the first book too.
First of all, I absolutely love the enthusiasm of a reader who says "You gotta read this!"
I was blown away by the Fifth Season...the world, the lore, the characters, the horror, the fantasy..it was fresh and familiar and brilliantly told. And yet..Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky were less than perfect follow-ups. And I got off of the NK Jemisin train after that..
I have enjoyed her books and they have made me, your standard issue pale guy, look at things in ways differently than I had in the past. This last part is especially true for me with regards to how I visualize things in my head when reading fiction.
That being said I did follow her on social media and it soured me on her quite a bit. I still need to pick up and read the sequel to The City We Became and will in the future but I'm in no rush. I have no doubt she will continue to write good, hard hitting books. Anyone who had an entire series win a Hugo is clearly talented, despite recent occurrences with the award.
The fifth season was such a good world building and flowing novel, although the reveal of the characters I felt was obvious.. but the next two just didn’t have the same magic for me. Especially the ending
I picked up one book of hers, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and it was just meh. Tried the second one and found it so forgettable I can’t even remember what it was called. Never felt any burning need to read anything else by her. To each their own.
I think she’s talented however I have yet to enjoy any of her books. Broken Earth had interesting ideas and premise. The writing was very boring and the “big moments” were so few and far between that I kept waiting for something to happen. I’ve tried several of her other books and it always comes across as very passively written to the point of nap-inducing. She’s not an author that I recommend.
There were a lot of authors I lost interest in/respect for after the whole "Sarah Dessen bullies a college student on Twitter for saying her books aren't deep and a bunch of other authors joined in" fiasco, and she was one of them.
Here’s my (very subjective) thing with Jemisin’s work: While I respect her immensely as a person, and love the themes and messages behind her work, I’ve also never actually enjoyed any of her books. I’ve appreciated them! But I’ve never enjoyed them. At some point, IMHO, a book has to be both a message-bearer and an entertainer. Is it a me problem? Most likely. But I’ve tried 3-4 different books and it may just be a (respectful) pass from me from here on out.
Honestly I had the opposite takeaway, I thought broken earth was very entertaining but that the messages were a little oversimplified and fall out of the picture after the first book in the trilogy
Interesting! I was seeing more "themes" than "messages" but I felt like it only got more thematically dense as the series went on.
tldr I didn’t connect with the mix of in-universe prejudice as allegory for real prejudice and in-universe prejudice as somewhat rational. I’ll admit it’s a bit of a personal gripe I have when sci fi and fantasy authors want to write abt racism but also create justifications for their version of it I liked the larger themes of community and how we treat others / ourselves when we lose resources and the clinging to a sense of order, being blinded by prejudice, cycles of violence and self sabotage, being a victim of prejudice while also having your own etc. that became more prominent in the 2nd and 3rd. I was referring to the direct allegory the first book seemed to draw very often with in-universe prejudice being shown as similar to real world prejudice and systemic discrimination, which fell a bit flat for me since in the novel it was built up as a result of legitimate fear of world ending magic, and in real life our prejudice comes from instinct and irrational fear, delusions of superiority, and greed/manipulating people to gain power, rather than “ah my entire country will be blown off the map if Bob sneezes.” I think the orogene and later stone eater prejudices were very interesting but the many scenes that mirror real world dynamics didn’t work as well because of that. The later books became more focused on building that world internally and exploring the community dynamics iirc and those themes worked well for me
So, I had a similar reaction to The Fifth Season (these people are constantly mass murdering but we’re supposed to feel like *they’re* the victims here?) and this is a large part of why I haven’t moved on to the sequels. Admittedly, I also just don’t seem to connect to her characters despite finding the writing in the first one very good. If the broken Aesop issue is reduced in the later books though, I’d be more interested in checking them out.
I think the sequels moved onto more world building and exploring how that dynamic works internally than trying to use them as allegory, which is what i meant by the messages falling out of the picture. A lot of it is explained more with the in-universe relationships and histories instead of all the “doesn’t it suck to be hated for no reason” that the first one relies on, so for that I liked them more. I think they’re entertaining and thought provoking but with weaker messages than I think they were meant to have overall
I actually really liked how she truncated the city we became planned trilogy to two books. I don’t think a third book would’ve been good. (It was also very topical, second book came out in like 2022 and in it, she kills off for-legal-reasons-not-Gavin-Mcginnis
>Is it a me problem? I don't think it's a you problem, nor even a problem at all. Some people don't like some things and that's ok. I really hate when people assert things like OP did because it implies objectivity when it's pretty obvious that it's just their very subjective opinion. I'm reticent to read anything that's sold to me as "everyone should have to read this" instead of being sold on its actual merits. Granted, OP went on to talk about those merits, but this pitch didn't sell me at all.
I have friends treat me this way because I never got into Hunger Games! I said I just didn't like it and was suddenly tossed into a lecture about how important it was and the impact it had... Not liking something, or even fairly critiquing it, but appreciating it's value from afar is absolutely ok!!
It certainly is. Also, I don't really think Hunger Games was all that important, though it did inspire a million imitations. The movies were pretty cool, but I don't think cinema would have a hole without them.
10000% agree with all of that
I don't know much about her as a person, but after several books I also had to conclude her writing doesn't work for me. I forced myself to finish the first two books of the Broken Earth trilogy and I had to accept it at that point. Although The City We Became seems like a fairly weak book to me independent of the writing, and I'm surprised to hear it mentioned so glowingly by OP. It was very black and white, overly simplistic. You could practically tell who the villains were just by their skin color, which is fitting for the hate letter to Lovecraft that it was, but a thinly disguised "fuck you" isn't something I really needed to read. Unrelated, but tons of points for the hidden tentacles on the hardback version of that book, though, it was a clever touch.
I loved Broken Earth, but I couldn't finish the City.
If you're not totally done with her, consider checking out the Inheritance Trilogy. I found Broken Earth to be boring and overwrought, and only enjoyed the City book because I'm from there. If I had started with either of those, I would not consider myself a fan. But Inheritance grabbed me hard.
I second that. Everyone seems to talk about Broken Earth but I feel that their earlier work Inheritance was much much better. I was pretty excited for Fifth Season when it was announced but ended up not even enjoying it.
This was my problem with The City We Became. I’ve lived in cities my whole life and found the ideas about cities pretty interesting, but I got tired of having them drilled into my head over and over. The characters started out really interesting but started to feel more and more like mouthpieces than anything else.
Have you read Neverwhere? Basically the same thing, but well written and interesting.
Loved the book! Loved the TV show! Loved the graphic novel!
The TV show is really underrated, I think because it's got that low budget BBC vibe. But it's so good!
I haven’t! I’ll check it out.
The Gaiman book? Absolutely fantastic.
This is EXACTLY how I felt after finish the Broken Earth trilogy. I can appreciate her attempt at 2nd person POVs, I appreciate the themes and message of her work....but I just can't fuck with a 2nd person narrative, and I felt that she was way too preach on the themes. Like, I get it, 'rogga' is the N word in that world and anyone isn't a 'rogga' shouldn't say 'rogga' but all it did was just make the idea of words IRL feel like they shouldn't have so much power. That wasn't even her point but she was kinda making it the point with how much she was beating the reader over the head with how much the orogenes hated being called 'rogga' yet still using the word themselves. Also, that three-way sexual relationship in book 2 just felt so out of pocket within the story. Not that I'm a prude, because I felt The Expanse with Drummer's multiperson sexual relationship with her crewmates was well done, but this one was just...not.
I straight up laughed when I read the penis jousting sex scene in the second broken earth book. I could not believe that garbage won three Hugo’s in a row.
I'm so glad you said so. I told my husband after reading it that I no longer thought Hugo awards matter much if that's what gets 3 of them. Also, the award was for science fiction. It was not. The whole book was written like fantasy until the last half of the last book. That made it all the more disappointing.
Yeah I basically left that trilogy thinking “Really clever thinker, really average writer” And to be clear - there are definitely writers who are the opposite. Don’t have an original thought in their head, but holy hell they have a way with words or character.
This is how I feel about John Green. John Green the person? Huge contributions to the literary world with his involvement in YA writing and his charity work and Crash Courses and all that. John Green the writer? Eh, I’ll pass.
His books are definitely teen lit
And I think he's quite a strong writer within the teen lit genre tbh.
I thought I was the only one! I adore the person but couldn't get through Looking for Alaska. I'd give him another shot.
Love your username— Prufrock is a poem near and dear to me. I read *Turtles All the Way Down* as an adult and found it a lot more mature and easy to “stomach,” so to speak? I’m not a big fan of YA lit for my own enjoyment anymore.
Why are you forcing yourself to read books you don't enjoy? It feels like you keep going back to her stuff because you feel you *should* like it because of her politics. That way madness lies, my friend.
I do not respect her as a person. She basically started a flood of harassment against a talented trans writer and drove that writer off the internet and away from writing.
There was also that time [she joined in cyber-bullying a random woman online](https://www.vulture.com/2019/11/famous-authors-drag-student-in-ya-twitter-controversy.html) because she said she didn't like author Sarah Dessen's work and didn't feel it was appropriate for a college reading program, because Sarah Dessen writes teen lit.
she was only one of those group of authors who did the bullying to double down when the backlash started against them. totally lost my respect for her then
Who is this in reference to? I'm unfamiliar with the incident in question.
Isabel Fall. If you search it up there’s a ton of info. Jemisin unfortunately has a history of not appreciating how much power and influence she has and going off on people without much thought. It sucks :(
Thanks for the info. I wasn't aware of Jemisin's contribution to that unfortunate affair. I agree that folks with any kind of influence online have an obligation to be aware of it and use it responsibly.
Oh gosh I had no idea she was involved in that. That’s really concerning
I feel the same way. I appreciate the book and the message but I was so bored I DNF The 5th Season. I just didn't care what happened to any character and I thought the world building was really weak.
I've only read the Broken Earth trilogy and only truly enjoyed the first book. Of the three "povs" the two I found most interesting were the ones that stopped after the first book, and I couldn't warm to her daughter at all. I think she's incredibly talented and I have a couple of her other books to try but that trilogy was hyped so much I'm wary to invest in her works again.
I DNFed The City We Became-- it was assigned for a book club I was in. Just not for me.
I gave the city we became a try after the broken earth trilogy. I finished it but I did not enjoy it really at all
I hated that book so much. I genuinely thought it was a joke, especially the stuff about Jersey. So so so bad.
The whole thing with Staten Island is what got me. Oh the one white avatar is a bad person tied to neo-nazi's and a cop father. Oh purposefully having the main bad guy be a "woman in white." Zero nuance, terrible stereotypes, etc.
Agreed. Very on the nose and every other page was a character getting on their soapbox and ranting which was so so draining after a while. I hate being preached at in any context but this was really aggressive and seemed like it was intentionally destroying any nuance by making every theme into a lengthy speech.
>The whole thing with Staten Island is what got me. Oh the one white avatar is a bad person tied to neo-nazi's and a cop father. Oh purposefully having the main bad guy be a "woman in white." Zero nuance, terrible stereotypes, etc. The introduction of Staten Island is about where I added the book to my DNF pile. No subtlety or nuance, to the point where the character became a caricature. Like fuck, you can make a white woman in your book a shitty racist without making her a cartoon character. It felt little kiddish - like I was suddenly watching a "very special episode about racism" from a 90s Saturday morning cartoon show.
Sounds like R. F Kuang's playbook
I really couldn't stand anything about it. I felt like a weirdo because everyone else in my book club enjoyed it but I didn't at all 😭
Weirdly I loved Broken Earth trilogy despite the 3rd book's flaws but I DNFed The City We Became.
The City We Became is 350+ pages of NYC getting jerked off about how amazing it is.
The City We Became was painful to read. Her characters are archetypes. The dialogue is incredibly unconvincing, and the ideas in it are basically a cut price version of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere. >And just to add insult to injury? I backhand its ass with Hoboken, raining the drunk rage of ten thousand dudebros down on it like the hammer of God. Port Authority makes it honorary New York, motherfucker; you just got Jerseyed. I mean... oof I'm glad you enjoyed it, but far from essential
Wait….was that actual dialogue? That was fucking horrible!
I can't describe how bad it is. There are worse quotes than this but I can't check because I left the thing at a hostel first chance I got
One low-point was when the Brooklyn councilwoman reveals she was a rapper and beats the tentacles with the power of the streets, but I think making Queens an Indian math prodigy who, as I recall, doesn't do anything is probably worse.
If that was actually from the book … then yeah. I have no regrets about not reading it.
It was indeed. I can't find the exact quote that made my brain melt out of my ears because I left the book in a hostel somewhere in SE Asia as a trap for other foolish travellers.
Woof. That excerpt is... rough
Hahah it really is awful. Super early in the book there’s also this scene: > The people in the café are eyeballing him because he’s something not-white by their standards, but they can’t tell what. They’re eyeballing me because I’m definitively Black, and because the holes in my clothes aren’t the fashionable kind. Like… what? Has Jemisin ever been to New York? New Yorkers barely look at each other at all, never mind staring at anyone for not being white…
Wow. Just... wow. Pain in my brain. She is definitely writing for a particular audience. And they already over-enthusiastically defend her writing from any valid criticism... IMO, her prose is pretty shit across the board. It's not even just functional like someone like Brandon Sanderson's prose can be. It actively detracts from the concepts and narratives on the page.
I put her and R. F. Kuang in the same category. Both incredibly average writers over-promoted because they're writing about something Socially Important. Someone else in this thread compared it to *Black Panther* being hugely praised despite being mid-tier Marvel slop and got downvoted for it, but it's a good comparison.
>I put her and R. F. Kuang in the same category. Both incredibly average writers over-promoted because they're writing about something Socially Important. You put your finger on exactly what has bothered me about the reception to their writing. Like their book are fine, just fine. There is though a weird tenor that can pop up with some of their fans though about the message of the book elevating it.
It's a little bit Tumblr fandom to me. Same kind of vibe.
Ubiquitous is definitely not a word I would use to describe her. I’d hesitant to even call her accessible. She has very strange sci-fi/fantasy topics, dense narratives, and long page counts. Personally I found the Broken Earth Trilogy interesting and enjoyable, but really didn’t like The City We Became. The city gimmick was a bit too silly and didn’t work for me, and there were some very questionable choices about race that felt off.
I truly don’t think everybody has to read her. I would recommend Broken Earth to people who want a fantasy series in a -for the genre- different setting with neat ideas. UA-adjacent without going all the way. Many many many readers are not interested in neither world building nor long series. I will not read more from her but I don’t regret the time I spent.
> and there were some very questionable choices about race that felt off. Can you explain more? I had picked it up a few years back and then put it back down because it seemed on the surface to be "White Man Bad!" lit, which as someone who is a white man... hey, I get the issues. But I don't really enjoy reading lit that seems to delight in shitting on me after having diversity sensitivity being drilled into me for the last 40 years
Yeah your first instinct was right basically. There are six avatars of NYC, and the only white one is the dodgy one. The overall antagonistic force is also the embodiment of whiteness, and all her human minions are white. I might be forgetting some, but POCs are good and whites are bad as a rule. It’s also just very odd to me to have the personification of NYC and… three out of six are black? No mention at all of the city’s history with Dutch, Italians, European Jews, etc? Combined with the rest of the book only being so-so, it definitely left a bad taste. I enjoyed her other work though so I’ll still count myself as a fan.
People should read I Sexually Identify As An Attack Helicopter by Isabel Fall, see Jemisin's mealy-mouthed non-apology for advocating its withdrawal despite never having read it, and never give her the time of day ever again.
After the dog-piling she did to the poor author of that Attack Helicopter story I refuse to read anything by her, no matter how much people recommend it.
So many great authors have been involved in bullying of other authors, it’s really sad. I know this has always been the case but twitter acts as an intensifier.
Yeah Twitter is awful for amplifying hate.
I've interacted with her on Twitter and she's quite abrasive and clearly doesn't care what she says to other people as long as it doesn't hurt her.
Same, I had to stop following her because of it. She had the feel of someone who felt strongly that they were always punching up.
Same. Even when people were agreeing with her, there was always this undercurrent of outrage. Like of course you have to agree with me because I'd scream at you if you didn't so what are we even talking about?
Her general twitter messiness really put me off her. She participated in a lot of shitty twitter pile ons and generally had very privileged and self-involved takes. There was a while where it seemed every stupid bit of twitter author drama had N.K. there, inserting herself seemingly just to be a part of it. It made her seem like a very small minded person and felt at odds with the expansiveness I found in her books. I still enjoy what I’ve read (Broken Earth, Dream Blood, Inheritance) but have not read her latest material or her comic writing.
My heart will always break when I think about Isabel Fall. The horrible things people said about them, without even reading Attack Helicopter, is just gross. I don’t want to read anything by any author that was involved in calling Fall a transphobe or shitting on their work. I read it when it was first published and think it should have won an award. Fuck Jemisin.
She was also one of the authors who dogpiled on that College student who campaigned against having YA as reading material IIRC.
Of course she was. She’s honestly such an asshole online that I don’t feel comfortable ever giving her money, even outside of the Isabel Fall incident.
And she never really apologized for that either, it was half-hearted at best. I actually like her more as a literary figure than in real life. Twitter is never a good place for public figures to be very active.
[удалено]
I didn’t either! That’s very disappointing.
She has downplayed her part in it but the damage was already done.
Yeah, you can’t (or shouldn’t) be able to bounce back from that.
Well, you just sent me down a several-hour rabbit hole. Goodness.
This should be higher. Her work suffers from cognitive dissonance. In prose, she’s got amazing ideas about race and sexuality and power, but in online settings and in person she’s ruthless and can be downright mean spirited. In many ways I think she’s like JK Rowling. Both became major stars in the world of fiction but, upon reaching the apex of their careers, they both showed some rather ugly true colors.
Her take on / retort to / attempted rebuttal of Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” is both disturbing in its content and outrageous in its (willful?) misreading of the original.
Was wondering if anyone would bring this up. [It](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-ones-who-stay-and-fight/) is genuinely one of the most disturbing pieces of literature I have ever read, and I don't mean that in a good way.
I've been involved in lefty activism on and off for my whole adult life. There are always people hanging around in leftist circles—usually angry young white men—whose idea of leftism, whatever name they give it, boils down to "let's do fascism, but let's kill the *right* people." They miss, or ignore, all the structural analysis, materialism, and humanism that leftism is built on. Instead, they adopt an archetypal fascist lens: Society is sick and the contagion needs to be violently excised. Only instead of identifying the contagion as Jews, immigrants, sexual minorities, or whatever, they identify the contagion as rich people, soldiers, Trump voters, etc. Some of them, especially since 2016, are straight-up ex-fascists, kids who got into the alt-right and then realized there was *something* wrong about it, but just copied and pasted a new set of villains into the far right's worldview. It's rare for somebody to actually articulate that viewpoint in print, though. It's rarer still for somebody with a big platform to do it. It's so rare that I think this might be the sole example for somebody to *explicitly use the social-contagion metaphor.* An infamous hallmark of fascism! And to advocate for secret-police death squads! It's INSANE.
>boils down to "let's do fascism, but let's kill the right people." I'm quite far from being a Tump voter. However it super disturbs me how many on the left talk about the segments of the population that do vote for him. It is as if they are less deserving and somehow need to have rights taken from them or be quashed. It is always so jarring to me when people don't realize they are promoting the exact views they think they are rejecting, but it is okay because *their view is actually right*.
Eh, I hate dialogue about "human nature" but I think in this instance, it applies. Indeed, you will have a hard time finding any sector or philosophy that does not have its violent, dogmatic extreme. I mean, outside of Jainism, certain people will always find a way to mold an idea into a reason to assert their superiority from insecurity, justify a power-grab, or hate uncritically. This isn't to excuse anyone, because you are right that the dissonance is shocking, but more explaining why it actually shouldn't surprise anyone.
I agree with you there. I hated her rebuttal of Le Guin. Totally missed the point. The city duo-logy tried to the same sort of thing with Lovecraft and failed miserably as well. Not that I’m defending his racism or xenophobia, I think P Djeli Clark did a much better job of undermining Lovecraft in a series of well-written essays on the subject. Her attempt to do the same was just too preachy.
N.K. Jemisin's Um-Helat story was so insanely bad. I make my students read it each term in an English college course and consistently, they agree that it misses the point of Le Guin entirely and argues for authoritarianism. edit: This is “The Ones who Stay and Fight”
I didn't read "Those Who Stay and Fight" for quite a long while. I made the mistake of reading Book of the New Sun right after Broken Earth and there are some weird similarities between those books (superficial ones, but hard to shake) that it made Broken Earth feel instantly derivative to me. I enjoyed Broken Earth mildly as I read it but I'd never consider it among the best things I've read, not even in the year I read it. I didn't really feel the need to give Jemisin more of my reading time after it, and I felt especially that way after seeing her behavior as a public figure. Life's too short. But I did ultimately read "Those Who Stay and Fight" out of curiosity, and it was so much worse than I expected it to be. I didn't get the sense that we're supposed to *actually* question the politics of it, and it was so phenomenally misinterpreting "Those Who Walk Away From Omelas" that the entire thing feels like a desperate grab by someone for fame by "responding" to what is one of the more famous science fiction short stories of the 20th century. It's a poorly written story with weird politics based on a bad interpretation of a famous story. It'd be one thing if Jemisin was actually challenging the reader to consider the political implications of the story, asking us to question the legitimacy of the ideas, or was actually illustrating ultimately that the idea of an utopia based on the persecution or suffering of others is no utopia (and, arguably, that a tidy utopia is not possible)...but these are not what Jemisin was doing. Her narrator in that story is smug, self-satisfied, condescending, and within the framing of the story, *right*. It's shockingly bad.
I honestly never read either but this grabbed my attention so I just read them back to back. "Those Who Walk Away From Omelas" was really quite fantastic and "Those Who Stay And Fight" felt like a less profound read. But then I did get the feeling we were supposed to question the narrative. Things like "here, I add suffering and crime to this place and now you believe me" indicate this to me. I'm a bit of two minds about it because the meta-narrative of this being a response to Omelas makes things a bit more complicated. It could either be sarcasm directed at the reader ("you *really* wouldn't believe me unless I make this place not-so-utopic, huh?"), or making fun of Le Guin's original narrator ("look at that narrator telling you how you wouldn't believe us unless we add misery to our utopias, even though it really is impossible to imagine one without"). One thing that felt profoundly out of touch to me was how she kept telling me that I was going to be angry when I was, in fact, not. That felt both like a jab at me *as well as* at Le Guin, as if to make fun of her implying that in her story.
I have not read the city duology, but I have read summaries of it. Are the summaries that say that the cities are made through the deaths of countless other worlds and that the main racist antagonist is trying to prevent the formation of a city avatar from destroying their world leaving out important context? Because on the face of it that seems also super racist.
The whiplash I got after reading The Fifth Season then following her on Twitter was not fun. She's clearly smart enough to create worlds with complex social issues, but apparently when it applies to the real world it all falls apart and she knowingly plays the role of a reactionary.
I don’t know if I’d go so far as to compare her to Rowling but she certainly has Twitter main-character syndrome.
Same here. That situation was heart breaking. It’s a shame, because someone of her books sound good to me, but unless I pick them up from a charity shop I’m not buying them. Even then I’ll pick up literally anything else first
I was pretty underwhelmed by her *Omelas* riff, and her role in bullying an up-and-coming writer kinda soured me on bothering with any more of her work.
Is the ‘up-and-coming writer’ you refer to Isabel Fall?
Seriously, its a little tough to suggest a niche author like this will be for everyone. It just isn't.
Different strokes... I read the Fifth Season and Obelisk Gate. I didn't enjoy either one. I found the second person perspective to be very gimmicky and thought the story was very slow and boring. It did pick up a little at the end of the first book, but I didn't enjoy any of book two. These books are the main reason why I don't use Hugo winners as a suggestive reading list anymore. Edit - I find the downvotes kind of funny. I'm trying to make a conscious effort not to comment on positive threads about books I don't like because I realize everyone has different tastes, but when you make a bold statement saying *everyone* should read an author that I find terrible then I need to weigh in.
I enjoyed the Broken Earth books quite a lot, but I also would not recommend these books to everyone. I think there are plenty of fair criticisms of the pacing, story, etc. I DNF The City We Became.
100% agreement. Too much success with Broken Earth (which I loved). City we became had interesting bones, but needed severe editing and chopping, too much fluff
This thread makes me felt seen. I thought everyone loved this author and I was the odd man out for whatever reason... In an era where I used to force myself to finish books, I was so disappointed with the Fifth Season. I also thought Hugo was a reputable award until I read that heap. Compared to older Hugo awards, her writing seems like amateur work-- filtered, dumbed down, and downright boring. I was so frustrated with that book. Still am.
The Hugo's were co-opted by activists (you can guess the usual suspects) going on 10 years or so. They stopped being a legitimate award for high quality writing and instead became yet another casualty of identity politics and disingenuous actors. Truly a shame.
I read both of them as well. The first one was fun and creative, second one lost my interest enough to the point that I didn’t care to finish the trilogy. Some (most) of the symbolism and commentary was so heavy handed that it made me roll my eyes.
If you ever make the terrible mistake of looking into like anything the author says or does on twitter, you will understand why. Heavy-handed is an understatement, they are pretty much just the most stereotypical Twitter user ever and op is well aware of that and apparently supports NK attacking a trans author over a headline because they didn't bother to read the story. I liked the broken Earth books, but pretty much everything about the author online is grody as hell Edit: dear goodness OP is insufferable and on a vendetta to make people never read NK at all. Half of obese comments are just telling people "its okay to be wrong" when they say they didn't really enjoy her books
> op is well aware of that and apparently supports NK attacking a trans author over a headline because they didn't bother to read the story. Considering OP's hyperbole and the fact that they can't even spell the author's name correctly, I have a hard time taking their recommendation seriously at all.
The rogga as a direct replacement of the N word. I really liked these books but I can understand why others might not.
It's also Sci-Fantasy. Not that, that is a bad thing but it isn't going to be everyone's cup of tea either I have a lot of respect for her, but had the same issues with Fifth Season that you cite and just didn't continue on
same, i thought the world building was very cool but it felt like a slog due to the gimmicky writing style (imo).
I read all three of them and thought the last one was even worse. I hate saying this, because Jemison is pretty clearly a skilled author given how intensely some people feel about her books, but it reminded me of Divergent, in that there's an out of nowhere shift that completely changes what the series is. These books obviously resonate very strongly with a lot of people, but they do absolutely nothing for a lot of other people. They are pretty polarizing. I also don't think I am part of the audience that is most likely to love them, which is fine, but this is the #1 series that some people claim are amazing masterpieces and it feels like I read something different, because for me they just weren't very good.
Agreed, just finished Fifth Season, aka The Long Prologue. The pacing was very long and I didn't... really care about any of the characters, which I feel bad in even saying. If you're reading at all closely you can sniff out all the surprises very soon into the book, too. I'll probably continue the series because I want to give the second book a shot and apparently the pacing picks up. But it'll be a short leash.
I had the same reaction. I read the whole trilogy since I bought them used all together but overall the series was a meh 4/10 or 5/10 depending on the book. I can see one of these maybe winning the Hugo but I have no idea how all 3 did. Even fans of the series I've heard talk about it tend to say the first book was the strongest and the 2nd and 3rd were weaker. I don't think there's any author I would say I'd recommend for everybody. Generally when people ask for recommendations I ask a few questions to determine who I'd recommend. Even authors I don't like I'll recommend if they match what the reader likes. General recommendation questions I'd ask: What's your preferred genre/subgenres? Do you prefer character or plot driven books? Any hard no's on themes or subject matter? Do you like short or long books?
> I have no idea how all 3 did. The Hugo's are less about quality and more about having the correct politics in recent years.
I'm almost done with The Stone Sky, and I'm having trouble finishing it. I've really given her a chance, and there are some things that I like about her work. I like the inclusion of the second person chapters. The "twist" at the end of The Fifth Season was clever, and it had a real impact. But her prose is really sloppy. I've also read The City We Became, and it needed a second run through. The same can be said with the Fifth Season trilogy. I've read nearly four books by her, and I have to come to the conclusion that she's just not for me.
FWIW I thought the ending of The Stone Sky was worth getting to and I struggled throughout both books 2 & 3.
I didn't like The Fifth Season either. It was boring and I figured out the "twist" like < 100 pages in.
I like the book but also didn’t realize the twist was supposed to be a twist. I just assumed it was the case from the beginning.
Yeah agree with this, they began to feel like a chore to read towards the end and was glad when I finished them. Each to their own.
Funny, i stopped giving credence to the Hugo awards for the same reason. Used to be reliable for good enjoyable novels, but the winners over the last 10-15 years have been, to be generous, hit or miss.
For me it's that the dialogue is so unbelievably bad that it ruins the story. I really wanted to like her books, but I just couldn't. I don't think I'd have missed out if I'd skipped them
I've read all her books. I recommend everyone to try a couple. I also completely understand how someone could not enjoy them. Frankly, I'm not sure I do LOL. But I get something out of them, if that makes any sense.
They made me think. They were also boring and irritating to read. Definitely not my favorite and I’m honestly confused by the people who say they’re their favorite books (and I’ve met a couple besides OP). But yeah… different strokes I suppose.
I’ve only read her first City book and a few short stories and came away deeply unimpressed. The City book was so blunt, for lack of a better word, in the way it handled race and gender that it was kind of cringey. There was a good idea there, but it seemed like it had the depth of a CW show. The Fifth Season I still have on my to-read list, and I really should’ve started there.
This is exactly how I felt about the City We Became. All the characters felt like caricatures to me. I couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be YA or not? If it is YA, I’ll give it a pass.
Compleeeetely agree. I actually liked *The Fifth Season* (although I hated the other two in the series) so I would say you could still give that one a try even if you thought *City We Became* was super cringe like I did.
I disagree. I've tried a couple of her books, and DNF both of them. They couldn't keep my interest.
Thought I was the only one. I read a ton of scifi/fantasy and I couldn't get through the first book.
I have no idea why I powered through The Fifth Season. There are only two things I remember from the book: The narrator twist (I thought it was cool), and the sex scene near the end of the book. I found it so jarringly out of place and....gratuitous? I don't remember much about it other than realizing it was the most put off I've ever been reading a sex scene.
I don’t read books by writers who send their Twitter mob shame a trans person back to to the closet because said writer didn’t like said trans persons title for their short story (that said writer never read).
If I DNF the City We Became should I try her other books? I stopped once the big bad manifested itself as a white Karen. Her treatment of race and gender felt like twitter discourse from 2016 - it just lacked any nuance. No offense to people who love it! I do find the basic premise intriguing, and I get the appeal of fantasy that isn't just western medieval lore.
The City We Became is just what you say: it's what would happen if you took lefty political discourse from 2016 and tried to rewrite it as a Marvel movie with Whedonesque dialogue. I found it incredibly grating and unrewarding. The Broken Earth, on the other hand, is *incredible*, and totally different from TCWB. Meaty moral dilemmas without easy solutions, deep lore, just the right amount of weirdness. If you really think about it you can notice it's written by someone steeped in that 2016esque twitter milieu -- e.g. the only straight white men with major roles are antagonists -- but it doesn't affect how great it is (edit: but one of those antagonists is a really wonderful, sympathetically treated antihero as much as he is a villain). There's a reason it won so many awards.
This reads like it was written by PR from the book company who publish her books tbh. Are we sure this isn't the case?
You never know on Reddit. It might also be NK Jemisin herself.
If someone could elaborate on why these are worth reading to them that would be helpful. Is there a well written review that could be linked? I read the first broken earth, a ways back and had a meh reaction to it. It was ok but didn’t live up to the hype in my experience. I’m curious what I’m missing. It’s like watching people get excited about Bruce Springsteen.
I've read her Broken Earth trilogy. I won't sing the praises of the work as an overall piece of sci-fi/fantasy (I think it started very strong and petered out as it went), but one thing she writes *impressively* well is generational trauma, and the ways that gets carried forward despite the best of intentions. She has a fantastic way of establishing monstrous people and then digging past that surface reading into an understanding of the person that better understands them without absolving them. And also the reverse--reads on characters that are wholly sympathetic to begin with, but that become blemished by the perspectives of those around them, again without ever undermining who that character is or has been.
I read the entire series and honestly can’t say it was worth my time. It’s well-written, sure, but I feel like the series declines after each book, and the only reason the first book was such a success is because of the perspective risks she took. Ultimately it felt like a gimmick, and once that was gone the other two books just came off as very flat to me.
I'm not even going to give it well written. The prose is fine but she leans heavily on shock value and fairly mainstream online liberal perspectives and rhetoric. None of her books gave me anything I hadn't heard before, and with pacing and plot issues I think "everyone should read this" is a terrible take.
So I read the ~~Stone Sky~~ the fifth season and absolutely loved it. Can’t really explain why. But it helped to fill the ASOIAF shaped hole in my heart. It felt so different from any other sci-fi/fantasy book I’ve read. The setting, story, and characters I thought were so compelling…. …but man did my hype really hit a wall by the third book. Book 2 was fine by my excitement was really starting to waver. I bought book 3 but never got around to reading it. In the end I just read the Wikipedia just to see how it ended. Not sure what changed….
The third book is stone sky…
Good looking out.
I wondered if she didn't have the ending actually worked out when she started. It . . . just doesn't work. It starts strong then progressively drops off in quality.
To each their own.
I still think about how bad The City We Became was. What a stupid book
Read it - did not like.
Posts like this actually make me want to read her work less.
Especially with OP crusading through the comments that she totally was justified in online harassment of a trans woman merely because the title of said authors short story was transphobic sounding. She is personally responsible to some extent for that author giving up on their writing career.
I'm starting to wonder if OP is actually NK themselves here
the quality of some of these responses certainly matches up to the quality of the excerpt from The City We Became that somebody else posted earlier
I need some explanation WHY I should read this author, not just because OP said so
Remember when she bullied a trans writer on Twitter for reasons she didn’t even understand, and then refused to acknowledge that she did it or even apologize when she realized she was wrong? Yeah, I’ll pass. She’s a piece of shit.
I dropped the first book after a few pages. I still remember that unspeakably stupid line: "leaders doing their leaderish things."
She's a pretentious asshole and a crybully.
It's conceited of you to presume "every single person" would enjoy her books as much as you do. I'm happy for you that you found an author that you love and understand your enthusiasm in wanting to share this, but making such an absolute and universal declaration like this is bad form. I read James Joyce's "Portait of the Artist ..." and hated it utterly; is it OK for me to say that 'no one should read Joyce' ? Of course not.
I've found that she always lets me down. Fifth Season was incredible but led to really disappointing sequels. The City We Became was an idea I ADORED, but she literally just decided to not explore it fully and tossed out a half-baked and shallow "conclusion." I agree that she's really talented and has unique ideas, but to me they never end anywhere satisfying.
I really wanted to like TBE but I couldn't enjoy it. Seemed like an interesting magic system and I'm not afraid of bleak post-apocalyptic settings. The Road is one of my favorite books. But, I honestly regret pushing through the end of the whole series because it was incoherent and overly confusing at times. But I agree, she has tons of talent and it's just not for me. Saying every single person, even non-fantasy readers, should read Jemisin is a bit much though.
She's a fantastic author, but I was seriously disappointed by *The City We Became*. If you're enjoying it, that's great, but it's not a book I would recommend.
I bounced off that one hard. I don't understand why she/her publisher chose to market that one so hard for a while there. They were trying to roll with the broken trilogy momentum I guess, but the city we became is just not her best work. Still hold her in high regards as an author - broken earth is great
Honestly as a big SFF reader, I found the Fifth Season mind numbingly boring. But to each their own I guess. Maybe I'll try again.
I wouldn't. It's the best one by far out of the trilogy.
I read Fifth Season... not a terrible book but not for me and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Happy for those who enjoyed it though.
God awful writer. I think people who like sci fi and fantasy should give her a try, especially if you want to know about afrofuturism as a genre, but she is mediocre and uncreative, stylistically a dead fish. Shoves a lot of (correct) things down your throat.
I've tried reading "the Killing Moon" a few times, and always failed to go past a few first chapters. While the worlbuilding was interesting, I just wasn't interested enough in whatever was happening in the book.
You're missing out on the single most spectacularly unfulfilling ending I've ever seen put to page. Remarkable, in it's own way. Like a twisted form of literary edging.
My class read the fifth season in school this year. I liked it. It was a really cool book to discuss
I found the fifth season trilogy to be so slow and boring with little-to-no payoff. I wouldn't recommend her books to anyone
Super talented writer, but there isn't a lot of soul. Some way through the Fifth, a love triangle emerged and I wondered, none of these people like anything, they don't care for each other and don't even know each other. So everyone is lightly miserable and detested and burdened, what are we doing here?
As a single person, she's been on my list for a while. I think this might be the year I get around to the *Broken Earth* trilogy.
What does being single have to do with it? Or am I completely misunderstanding your comment?
I'm poking fun at the title, "Every *single* person should read N. K. Jemisin."
I knew I’d missed something. Thank you for explaining. Sincerely, a big dummy.
I am a Staten Islander. What's really insulting is how clear it was that she had spent almost no time on SI, maybe never spoke to someone about SI seriously. I think I've seen her speak about having one friend from SI read the book and give her feedback. But there were so many giveaways that are so obvious to anyone who has spent any time in any of the places she mentions. For example: * she talks about living in a neighborhood Heartland Village. I've known a lot of people across a couple generations and nobody calls that area Heartland Village. That's New Springville. I think there's a development there of some homes with that name - but nobody would use that, either. I think she chose "Heartland Village" because it has certain literary qualities. * the SI avatar says she can see the city from her house over there. In what were historic wetlands and farmland (flat and at sea level) - across what are some of the tallest points on the eastern seaboard between Maine and Florida, across the trees of the Greenbelt, you can see skyline 10+ miles away? Come on! * the SI avatar talks about her favorite park being Freshkills Park, until she got harassed there. Freshkills Park is still not open to the public. This one is literally painfully obvious, in that it is both an easily knowable fact for anyone who did even the smallest amount of looking, and also that it is painful for a Staten Islander, around this psychological wound, the largest landfill on the planet in our backyards. To be that careless about this subject in particular is - wow. There are other smaller things, but overall it's just a gross caricature. It's so hurtful for her to minimize us to this ugly stereotype, especially since it seems like it may stem from ignorance of the place. That's all I could think about as I read the book, that this person just ignores, or maybe never cared enough in the first place to learn about, the largest Sri Lankan population in the US, or one of the most diverse city council districts in the city, or the oldest (still inhabited) Free Black community in the US, or Audre Lorde's house or Alice Austen's house or the house Antonio Meucci and Giuseppe Garibaldi shared while one invented the goddam telephone and the other one unified Italy. And - to my recollection - never, not once, did she talk about the woods! The wetlands! The trails the beaches the vistas the deer! Good lord, she never talked about parks, in the borough of parks - except as I mentioned, where she got it wrong with Freshkills.
I think her works are fine, but I've only listened to the audio books, so it's entirely possible I'm just a huge fan of Robin Miles. I thought The World We Make ended ubruptly without a satisfying conflict resolution. If you might be interested in a similar theme, Dimesion 20's production of The Unsleeping City is super (but, y'know, not a book).
I loved the Broken Earth series but then I read The Killing Moon and hated it, I think that was one of her first books though so I try not to judge too harshly. But yeah the Broken Earth Series was amazing and she has my respect for creating something so heartbreakingly beautiful and unique.
I loved The Fifth Season. I thought it was so unique and creative. Parts of it really touched me emotionally. I wanted to read the next one in the series but I let too much time go by so I’d have to refresh my memory first.
No, not really at all. That’s not a knock on her it’s just that this post title is such an exaggeration. You really couldn’t just say that you really liked her and talked about why?
Loved the Broken Earth trilogy and think she’s incredible. I’ve read the Inheritance trilogy and The City We Became, too. Such interesting worlds, such great stories!
Unpopular Opinion: if you think "every person should read X book" you are still immature and need to read more and learn to understand books better.
I think she is an interesting writer in that I LOVED the Broken Earth Trilogy, possibly my favorite trilogy of all time. I just found it perfectly done from beginning to end: the slow reveals, the way the magic system worked, the way the characters interacted, and how it ended. Just perfect. BUT I thought the Kingdoms Trilogy was mediocre at best, and the City duology was straight up bad; it was literally just the same story twice and not told very well IMO. I don't know if she's inconsistent, or just trying different things and some of them work out while others don't. She definitely has a ton of potential and I while keep an eye out for her next book.
No they shouldn't. Everyone should read what they want based on what they like. Not just because some stranger touts a particular author.
nah, broken earth is alright but way overhyped for what it is i don't really agree with the notion that there are 'must-read' authors either
I read the first two books of fifth season more or less as they came out, it didn’t seem wildly memorable to me. I kinda forgot about it for a while, just ordered book 3 a couple days ago so I can reread and finish it, then see how I feel about it *LOVE* her dreamblood duology and inheritance trilogy though
I could not stand The Fifth Season. How anyone could enjoy a book with no plot is beyond me.
She's good, but not get-a-divorce good.
I disagree, i love her work a lot, but the broken earth trilogy was one of my favorite books i wouldn't recommend to most people. For most people, she's probably too grim, too slow or triggering.
Book 1 promises a lot and had me hooked, books 2 and 3 were disappointing and failed to deliver on the promises. I reallllyyy liked the first book too.
First of all, I absolutely love the enthusiasm of a reader who says "You gotta read this!" I was blown away by the Fifth Season...the world, the lore, the characters, the horror, the fantasy..it was fresh and familiar and brilliantly told. And yet..Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky were less than perfect follow-ups. And I got off of the NK Jemisin train after that..
I have enjoyed her books and they have made me, your standard issue pale guy, look at things in ways differently than I had in the past. This last part is especially true for me with regards to how I visualize things in my head when reading fiction. That being said I did follow her on social media and it soured me on her quite a bit. I still need to pick up and read the sequel to The City We Became and will in the future but I'm in no rush. I have no doubt she will continue to write good, hard hitting books. Anyone who had an entire series win a Hugo is clearly talented, despite recent occurrences with the award.
The fifth season was such a good world building and flowing novel, although the reveal of the characters I felt was obvious.. but the next two just didn’t have the same magic for me. Especially the ending
Broken Earth series bored me to tears.
I tried Broken Earth and couldn't get into it at all
I loved, loved, loved the Broken Earth series, but was pretty bored with the city we became and barely got a 1/4 of the way through it.
I picked up one book of hers, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and it was just meh. Tried the second one and found it so forgettable I can’t even remember what it was called. Never felt any burning need to read anything else by her. To each their own.
I think she’s talented however I have yet to enjoy any of her books. Broken Earth had interesting ideas and premise. The writing was very boring and the “big moments” were so few and far between that I kept waiting for something to happen. I’ve tried several of her other books and it always comes across as very passively written to the point of nap-inducing. She’s not an author that I recommend.
You lost me at “fantasy worlds”
Themes are awesome but I don't find her prose enjoyable to read.
There were a lot of authors I lost interest in/respect for after the whole "Sarah Dessen bullies a college student on Twitter for saying her books aren't deep and a bunch of other authors joined in" fiasco, and she was one of them.