★★★★ (3.7 of 5)

• Full Title: The Obelisk Gate
• Author: N.K. Jemisin
• Year: 2016 (mine was a trade paperback)
• Pages: 391*
• Genre: Fantasy
• Publisher: Orbit
• ISBN 978-0-316-22926-5 (trade paperback)
• Wikipedia page
• Author’s Wikipedia page

(* not counting appendices, acknowledgements, “meet the author”, or sneak peak of another book)

 

Summary

The Obelisk Gate won the 2017 Hugo for Best Novel, the middle year of a three-year Jemisin sweep (no other author has won three consecutive best novel Hugos, nor has any other author won this Hugo for all three books of the same trilogy). It follows 2015’s The Fifth Season and is followed by 2017’s The Stone Sky.

Beginning almost exactly where the previous book left off, The Obelisk Gate is set on the same planet with mostly the same character set — including people called “orogenes” who can sense and cause (or prevent) earthquakes and other seismological events, magic beings that can move through stone (and look like statues), and magical floating obelisks that can enhance everyone’s magic. (Can’t say much else here without it being considered a spoiler.)

It’s epic fantasy and also an adventure novel.

It differs from the first book in three major ways: (1) most of the action in this one occurs in just two locations (instead of traveling all over the continent), (2) it’s almost entirely chronological (instead of needless back-and-forth), and (3) this one has neither an end nor a beginning.

 

Points For

As with the first one, I think I can see why it might be considered a Hugo contender (though I haven’t read the other 2017 contenders). It has depth and power, competently differentiated characters with understandable yet contrary motivations, and it seems unlike any other series of books I’ve read (though I haven’t read a lot of fantasy), and the world-building is top notch. Jemisin did more than slap non-standard names on cities and characters and throw in some earthquake magic; it’s clear that long histories have been considered and created behind these pages. Descriptions of people and places were sharp enough for me to visualize the goings-on — without getting in the way.

It took me a while to point to exactly why I liked it slightly better than the first book. Eventually, I decided it was the linear model of storytelling, which my brain simply prefers. Further, this one didn’t try the weird trick of pretending (spoiler alert for book one) there were three different women when the reader had guessed early they were all the same person. In this one, Essun is just Essun, the whole time, and Nassun is just Nassun.

 

Points Off For...

Still, points come off for the story being mostly in other books. (If you use an entire trilogy to tell a story, each book is going to contain less than half the story.) The first book at least had a beginning; this one doesn’t even have that. And I assume the ending is in book three. (At least this one had what I might call a “sub-ending”, giving us closure on a few story threads before heading into book three.)

And again, I count off for much of the book being in second-person — Essun is always referred to as “you” by the narrator. These sections are even longer than in the first book, because here Essun’s tale is most of the book. And, like the first book, this one is entirely in present tense. I am aware that one school of thought really likes the present tense, but it’s irritating, because how can you be telling me this story about something that happened, if it’s happening NOW? Just as before, my brain switched into active-translation mode (just as I do when reading overly British books), changing verbs and pronouns in real-time as I read. It slows me down but allows me to continue. A book will never get five stars from me with these kinds of shenanigans.

 

Conclusion

Parts of this were so good that I couldn’t put it down. I was glad to learn the story has been optioned for TV because so much is visual here. I just couldn’t get over the present tense and second person, and I’ll never get over the new model of not ending the story until the next book. I plan to read the third one before the end of the year.

 

 

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