I’m not waiting until my “best books of the year” post to tell you about a series I just finished, N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth trilogy. This is one of the best fantasy series I’ve ever read–and I read a lot of fantasy! The first book in the series, The Fifth Season, won the Hugo Award in 2016. The second book, The Obelisk Gate, won the Hugo Award in 2017, and the final book of the trilogy, The Stone Sky, is a finalist for the 2018 Hugo Award (announced in August).

I don’t want to spoil your reading experience by telling you a lot about these books; instead, I’m going to focus on why you should read them.

1. Strong female characters. The main characters in this series are female. The side characters are female. The only-meet-them-once characters are female. Yes, there are male characters, and they are interesting characters, but this is a story about women. The experience of reading this is the inverse of nearly every fantasy novel I’ve ever read.

Talk about whole new worlds!

I fear that by explaining this, you men won’t want to read the series, but you should! You should read it and allow the experience to open your eyes to what it is like to be a female reader of fantasy!

Did I mention that nearly all the characters are black too? Kaboom!

There are excellent reasons, in terms of world building, that this story is populated by people of color and that women are the movers and shakers–read it to find out why!

2. World Building. Another reason to read this series. The development of the setting is phenomenal! This is sort of our world…maybe… not really. Something really bad happened to the Earth (which you don’t discover until the end of the first book), so there are problems with volcanoes and earthquakes and tsunamis, etc. The fifth season refers to a time on the planet when eruptions and earthquakes and other natural disasters damage the air and land so severely that the human race is nearly wiped out–again and again. These “seasons” happen periodically. Here is a poem from The Fifth Season that explains the phenomenon:

Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall;

Death is the fifth and master of all.

Did that give you goosebumps? I got them the first time I read it.

3. Symbolism/Metaphor/Literary-ness. There is depth to this story. The plot is exciting and engaging, and you can read and enjoy it just for that. But there is so much more going on. I don’t want to spoil any of this for you, so I won’t explain all the incredible layers of meaning in these books. This is one of those stories that you think about for days, weeks, months after you finish. You can savor this story, over and over, and marvel at all the things N.K. Jemisin accomplished.

That’s it. I hope you are curious and eager to get these books. Let me know, below, if you’ve read them, or if my blog convinces you to read them, and if you love them as much as I do.