The Fifth Season is a 2015 science fantasy novel by N. K. Jemisin. It was awarded the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2016. It is the first volume in the Broken Earth series and is followed by The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky.
Not my favorite book but well crafted and continuing on with the series. A big part is I didn't really love the viewpoint characters, the side characters tend to be more interesting to me.
Took me a bit to get into it, and the changing of character names over time confused me a bit, but once I got past those two issues, it was a really fun read. Looking forward to the next two books to see what happens on Earth in a possible distant future where earth magic is common and nothing is stable.
I don't recall how I discovered Octavia E. Butler twenty years ago but I'm pretty sure I noticed N.K. Jemisin thanks to a review in the Washington Post that compared her work to Butler's Parables books.
The Fifth Season is the beginning of an epic, laying the foundation of a world with a magic system and a hierarchical guild that employs it. A world, like ours, that is changing, changing in ways the humans within it do not expect and may not survive. If you're watching fantasy series via streaming ... the world of The Wheel of Time is probably the best match in terms of feel and scope.
