Sections
The Shadowed Sun is a worthy sequel to The Killing Moon, bringing a new set of characters that are as tragic and complex as the ones of the previous book. The novel has few surprises up its sleeve, but it still manages to offer a well-crafted story.
We follow three main points of view in the book. The protagonist is a young woman named Hanani, who is training to be a sharer in the Hetawa, becoming a healer that cures people by manipulating their dreams. One day, she receives the news that one of her assistants died when helping a man with his nightmares, which puts her future in the Hetawa in jeopardy: some of her colleagues were just waiting for a good excuse to expel her and [...]
The Fifth Season talks about revolt with remarkable fury and finesse. It has a bold and challenging narrative that uses the second-person in a meaningful way and a trio of main characters that are as fascinating as they are tragic.
The book starts with the world ending twice. On a microscale, there is the world of a woman, who calls herself Essun, which ends when she stares at the body of her two-year-old son. On a macroscale, there is the ending of a whole civilization, with the earth shattering, the sky falling, and an empire ceasing to exist. In both cases, it’s a man who does the destruction. In both cases, the violence is overwhelming.
In this prologue the [...]
Written by N. K. Jemisin, The Killing Moon is a compelling page-turner: a fantasy novel with big ideas, strong narrative arcs, and good character development. It introduces the reader to a fantastical world, based on dreams and religion, where war and corruption are supposed to be extinct. Its main characters, however, start to discover that those are elements intrinsic to human nature, and that a society that claims itself free of them is just a hypocritical one.
The protagonist is Ehiru, a priest of the Goddess of Dreams, Hannanja, who has the task to bestow peace – death – to those deemed tainted by corruption or who are in desperate need to escape life in a painless way. [...]