The Broken Earth Trilogy Review: Why N.K. Jemisin’s Series Is a Fantasy Masterpiece

There are certain fantasy series that you finish knowing immediately that they are going to stay with you for a long time. For me, N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy is one of those series.

I had wanted to read Jemisin for a while, and when I finally decided to pick up one of her books, I chose The Fifth Season. That turned out to be one of my best reading decisions of the year.

After finishing all three books—The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, and The Stone Sky—I can comfortably say that The Broken Earth is one of the best fantasy trilogies I have read. In fact, it made me reconsider my list of favorite fantasy series and easily earned a place in my top five.

As someone who reads a lot of fantasy and science fiction, I went into the series with high expectations because of all the awards and praise surrounding it. Somehow, Jemisin still surpassed them.

Is The Broken Earth Trilogy Worth Reading?

Yes. The Broken Earth trilogy is absolutely worth reading, especially if you enjoy ambitious fantasy, science fiction, complicated characters, unusual magic systems, and stories that don’t feel like anything else in the genre.

What impressed me most was how complicated Jemisin’s world is without ever feeling impossible to understand.

The series deals with environmental catastrophe, oppression, survival, family, prejudice, power, history, and the consequences of civilizations that came long before the characters we meet. There are orogenes who can manipulate kinetic and thermal energy, mysterious floating obelisks, Guardians, stone eaters, devastating geological disasters, and an entire history that slowly unfolds across three books.

That sounds like a lot.

And it is.

Yet Jemisin reveals everything at exactly the right pace. Instead of explaining her world through huge sections of exposition, she lets readers discover it alongside the characters.

The unusual narration is also essential to the series. What initially feels strange becomes one of The Fifth Season’s greatest strengths once you understand what Jemisin is doing.

But as good as the world-building is, the character development may be my favorite part of The Broken Earth.

Essun, Nassun, Alabaster, Schaffa, Syenite, Damaya, and the other characters continually change as we learn more about them. Jemisin rarely lets her characters fit neatly into categories such as hero or villain. Their decisions are shaped by trauma, love, fear, survival, and the world that created them.

That complexity is a big reason why these books worked so well for me.

N.K. Jemisin Almost Gave Up on The Fifth Season

Knowing how close The Fifth Season came to not being written makes the finished trilogy even more remarkable.

After winning the Hugo Award for The Fifth Season, Jemisin wrote about reaching what she called her “Chasm of Doubt” while working on the novel. She said she believed the book might be beyond her ability to write and thanked the people who convinced her not to quit.

She had also previously written that the novel felt too strange, too dark, and too difficult at one point and that she had even discussed changing the planned trilogy into a standalone novel.

I am very glad she kept going.

What resulted wasn’t merely a successful fantasy series. The Broken Earth became one of the most acclaimed fantasy trilogies of its generation.

The Broken Earth Books in Order

N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy consists of three novels:

1. The Fifth Season — 2015
2. The Obelisk Gate — 2016
3. The Stone Sky — 2017

The books should be read in publication order. This is one continuous story, and each novel builds directly on the events and revelations of the previous book.

The Broken Earth Trilogy Reading Order

And unlike some fantasy series that take several books to reach their full potential, The Broken Earth grabbed me immediately.

The Broken Earth Made Hugo Award History

One of the most remarkable things about the trilogy is what happened after The Fifth Season was published.

The Fifth Season won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2016.

Jemisin then followed it with The Obelisk Gate, which won the 2017 Hugo Award for Best Novel.

And then The Stone Sky won the same award in 2018.

That means every novel in The Broken Earth trilogy won the Hugo Award for Best Novel.

Jemisin also became the first writer to win the Best Novel Hugo three consecutive years in a row.

Awards don’t automatically make a book great, but after finishing this trilogy, I understand why these novels received so much recognition.

The Fifth Season Review

The Fifth Season introduces readers to the Stillness, a continent regularly devastated by catastrophic geological events known as Fifth Seasons.

The novel opens with an orogene using his enormous power to fracture the continent, triggering what may become the worst Fifth Season in recorded history.

Orogenes are people capable of manipulating kinetic and thermal energy. That ability can make them incredibly powerful, but it also makes them feared, controlled, and hated by much of society.

From there, Jemisin tells the story through three different women: Essun, Damaya, and Syenite.

Essun

Essun lives quietly in the small comm of Tirimo while hiding the fact that she is an orogene.

Her life is destroyed when she returns home and discovers that her husband, Jija, has murdered their young son, Uche, after discovering the boy’s orogenic abilities.

Jija has also disappeared with their daughter, Nassun.

Overcome by grief and rage, Essun leaves Tirimo and sets out to find them just as civilization begins collapsing around her.

Essun’s story immediately pulled me into the novel. Jemisin doesn’t give readers a traditional fantasy hero embarking on an exciting adventure. Instead, we meet a mother whose world has already ended even before the larger world begins falling apart.

Damaya

Damaya is a young girl whose family discovers that she is an orogene.

Because of the fear surrounding people like her, she is taken away by a Guardian named Schaffa and brought to the Fulcrum.

The Fulcrum trains orogenes to control their abilities and become useful members of society, but Damaya gradually begins discovering that there is much more happening beneath the surface.

Her chapters help readers understand how orogenes are treated and how the systems controlling them operate.

Syenite

Syenite is an ambitious and talented orogene trained by the Fulcrum.

She is assigned to travel with Alabaster, one of the most powerful orogenes alive. The Fulcrum also expects the two to conceive a child together because of their abilities.

Their mission takes them across the Stillness and exposes Syenite to realities about the Fulcrum—and about the world itself—that she hadn’t fully understood before.

Alabaster quickly became one of my favorite characters in the trilogy because he understands things about their society that Syenite has never been allowed to question.

The deeper Syenite travels into that world, the more disturbing those questions become.

Why The Fifth Season Works So Well

What makes The Fifth Season special isn’t simply its plot.

It is how Jemisin tells the story.

At first, the multiple perspectives and use of second-person narration may feel unusual. I wasn’t sure exactly where Jemisin was going with everything.

Then the pieces begin fitting together.

That moment changes how you see much of what came before it.

It’s the kind of storytelling that makes you appreciate the novel even more after you’ve finished it because you realize how carefully Jemisin constructed everything.

And somehow, The Obelisk Gate manages to expand the story even further.

The Obelisk Gate Review

The second book shifts much of its attention toward Essun and Nassun, Essun’s ten-year-old daughter.

Nassun’s perspective gives the trilogy another emotional dimension because we finally get to understand what happened after Jija murdered Uche and fled Tirimo with her.

Jija cannot bring himself to kill Nassun, even though she is also an orogene. Instead, he takes her south because he has heard rumors about somewhere that may be able to “cure” her.

That journey fundamentally changes Nassun.

Nassun Becomes One of the Series’ Most Important Characters

One of my favorite parts of The Obelisk Gate was getting to understand Nassun better.

Her relationship with her father is complicated because she loves him while also knowing exactly what he did to her brother.

She is also incredibly powerful.

Eventually, Jija and Nassun arrive at Found Moon, a community where orogene children live and train under Guardians.

And waiting there is someone readers of The Fifth Season already know very well: Schaffa.

Nassun develops a strong bond with him as she begins discovering the true extent of her abilities.

Her storyline becomes increasingly important as the trilogy progresses, especially because Jemisin uses the relationship between Essun and Nassun to explore how trauma can travel between generations.

Essun and Alabaster in Castrima

Essun, meanwhile, remains in Castrima, an unusual underground comm where orogenes and non-orogenes attempt to live together.

There she reunites with Alabaster.

But he isn’t the same Alabaster we knew before.

His body is deteriorating, and he knows that he doesn’t have much time left.

Before that happens, however, he has something incredibly important to teach Essun: how to use the mysterious obelisks that float throughout the world.

Their conversations reveal much more about what is actually happening to the Stillness and why the Seasons continue happening.

This is where I thought Jemisin’s world-building became even more impressive.

Things that seemed mysterious or almost impossible to understand in The Fifth Season slowly begin connecting.

And once again, the personal story never gets lost inside the larger mythology.

The Battle for Castrima

Essun doesn’t have much time to master her new abilities.

Castrima soon finds itself facing another comm, and the conflict becomes a fight for survival.

Essun has already lost more than most people could survive losing, and now she must decide how far she is willing to go to protect the community she has found.

That conflict makes The Obelisk Gate feel different from The Fifth Season while still naturally expanding the same story.

But it was the final novel that cemented this trilogy as one of my favorites.

The Stone Sky Review

I loved The Stone Sky.

Ending an ambitious trilogy is difficult. The bigger the mythology becomes, the more questions an author has to answer, and fantasy series don’t always stick the landing.

Jemisin does.

The Stone Sky brings the story of Essun and Nassun to its conclusion while finally revealing the history behind the world readers have spent three books trying to understand.

And those revelations made me appreciate the entire trilogy even more.

Questions about the Seasons, the obelisks, orogeny, and the civilizations that came before finally start coming together.

But what I loved most about the finale wasn’t simply getting answers.

It was the emotional payoff.

At its core, The Broken Earth has always been a deeply personal story about parents and children, love and trauma, destruction and survival. The final book brings those ideas together in a way that felt deserving of everything Jemisin had built during the previous two novels.

By the time I reached the ending, I knew this wasn’t simply a fantasy trilogy that I enjoyed.

It had become one of my favorites.

The Broken Earth Is Now One of My Top Five Fantasy Series

Finishing The Stone Sky forced me to rethink my personal ranking of the best fantasy series I’ve read.

The Broken Earth easily makes my top five.

That isn’t something I say lightly.

Fantasy is my favorite genre, and I’ve read a lot of it. For a new series to immediately make me reorganize my favorites says a lot about how much these books impressed me.

One reason is that The Broken Earth doesn’t remind me much of anything else.

There are certainly recognizable elements of fantasy and science fiction throughout the trilogy, but Jemisin combines them into something that feels completely her own.

The magic is different.

The world is different.

The narration is different.

And the story isn’t afraid to become uncomfortable, complicated, or emotionally devastating.

Is The Broken Earth Fantasy or Science Fiction?

One of the things I enjoyed most about the trilogy is how difficult it can be to put into a single genre.

The Broken Earth is generally considered fantasy, but it contains significant science-fiction and post-apocalyptic elements.

As someone who loves both fantasy and science fiction, that combination worked perfectly for me.

Jemisin initially presents many elements as magical, but the more we learn about the history of the Stillness, the harder those genre boundaries become to define.

That makes discovering the truth about the world part of the fun.

If you enjoy fantasy novels with science-fiction concepts—or science fiction that feels mythic and fantastical—this trilogy should absolutely be on your reading list.

What Makes The Broken Earth So Good?

For me, five things separate The Broken Earth from most fantasy series:

The world-building. The Stillness is one of the most memorable fantasy settings I’ve encountered.

The characters. Essun, Nassun, Alabaster, Schaffa, and the rest of the cast are complicated people who make difficult and sometimes terrible choices.

The narration. Jemisin experiments with perspective in ways that actually matter to the story rather than feeling like a gimmick.

The themes. The series examines power, oppression, parenthood, survival, prejudice, environmental destruction, and generational trauma without forgetting that readers also want a compelling story.

The payoff. The revelations in The Stone Sky make earlier parts of the trilogy even better in retrospect.

That last point is especially important.

This feels like a trilogy that was constructed as one enormous story instead of three loosely connected adventures.

Who Should Read The Broken Earth Trilogy?

I would particularly recommend the series to readers who enjoy:

• Epic fantasy with unusual world-building
• Fantasy mixed with science fiction
• Complex magic systems
• Post-apocalyptic stories
• Morally complicated characters
• Books with unconventional narration
• Stories about ancient civilizations and lost history
• Character-driven fantasy
• Darker fantasy that still has something meaningful to say
• Series that reward paying attention to small details

The first book does ask readers to trust Jemisin for a little while. There are terms, cultures, characters, and mysteries that aren’t immediately explained.

Stick with it.

The confusion is intentional, and eventually the pieces start falling into place.

Final Thoughts on The Broken Earth Trilogy

One of the best feelings as a reader is discovering an author who immediately makes you want to explore the rest of their work.

That is how I feel about N.K. Jemisin after finishing The Broken Earth.

I started The Fifth Season hoping I would finally understand why so many fantasy readers praised Jemisin. Three books later, I understand completely.

The world-building is ambitious, the characters are unforgettable, the storytelling is inventive, and The Stone Sky delivers an ending worthy of everything that came before it.

The fact that all three books won the Hugo Award for Best Novel is an incredible achievement, but what matters more to me is how much I enjoyed reading them.

This is now one of my top five fantasy series, and The Broken Earth might eventually be viewed as one of the classic fantasy trilogies of its era.

If you’re a fan of fantasy or science fiction and haven’t read N.K. Jemisin yet, The Fifth Season is an excellent place to start.

I waited a long time to finally read her.

Now I’m wondering why I waited so long.

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Reviewed by Ahaqir Ishaq