Reading: The Obelisk Gate

[white_hart]

The second book in N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy, The Obelisk Gate picks up the story of the main protagonist, Essun, exactly where The Fifth Season left her, and interweaves it with the story of what has been happening to her daughter, Nassun, since the day she came home to find her father standing over the corpse of her younger brother. Essun's story continues to be narrated in second person present, which somehow works brilliantly to convey a sense of immediacy and connection with the narrative even though I'm sure it ought to feel clunky and gimmicky; it helps, perhaps, that it becomes increasingly clear throughout this book that there is a single first-person narrator behind both the second-person narrative and the third-person sections from other points of view (though this revelation is only one of several which each feel like they're turning the story around to an angle from which it's clear that it's a completely different shape from the way it looked before).

The Obelisk Gate is just as brilliant and compelling a read as the first book. It's also just as bleak and uncomfortable, dealing with violence, hatred, slavery and the desperate measures people resort to as their world collapses around them. It's very much not a book to read if you're seeking something comforting or uplifting, but it is an amazing book and I will be reading the third in the trilogy just as soon as I feel up to immersing myself in that world again.