I seriously begin to wonder what kind of problem I have with hyped books. Because this is another one of these books that almost everybody loves and I just didn´t feel the love for it at all. One problem may be that I´m not the biggest fantasy fan, but there are some fantasy books out there that I do enjoy, so I don´t think the genre is the cause for my dislike of The Fifth Season. The biggest problem I had was with the way that N.K. Jemesin has told her story.
But let me start with the only positive thing in this book: the worldbuilding and the origins. The characters inhabit a continent, which gets periodically hit by catastrophes such as earthquakes and vulcanic eruptions. This world is inhabited by people that aren´t able to control any kind of magic and by people, called origins, that are able to control earths magic and thus are able to quell the shakes and eruptions. Jemesin slowly reveals how the world is functioning and I think she did an incredibly job with this.
But I really disliked the structure of the story. The story is told from the perspective of three different female characters and throughout most of the book it isn´t clear how these three characters are connected with each other. One of the characters didn´t add anything significant to the overall storyline, one character was constantly angry and sulky and the third character was constantly depressed and sad, because something horrible has happened to her.
I suppose the author has meant for me to care about these characters, but I sincerely didn´t care about any of them. There is that big twist towards the end and I haven´t been shocked by it. The only thing I could think about was that the last three hours of the audiobook would turn into the most boring thing ever, because the story became totally predictable from this point onward. And it happened to be that way, it turned into a snooze fest because I just didn´t care.
I guess I have to mention that one narrative is told in second person present tense and I didn´t really enjoy this kind of narration as well.
I listened to this book on audio and the narrator Robin Miles and I enjoyed the narration. I´m pretty sure that I would have DNF´d this novel as a physical book. However, on audio I managed to finish it and I can bank it for the Booklikes-opoly as a book that starts with a F.
Page count: 468 pages
Money earned: $5.00
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