What do you think?
Rate this book
1424 pages, Paperback
First published October 2, 2018
Perhaps I should have expected this, but the trilogy is better than each of the individual books. Taken as a whole, the story arc is powerful, engaging, and (I think) groundbreaking. Each character has something with which the reader can identify, some trait that emphasizes his or her humanity to varying degrees. The world-building is top-notch and epic in scope.
My only complaints are (1) present tense throughout (I realize this is a personal, subjective thing), (2) the first and third book are out of chronological order, skipping around in time quite a bit, often without warning, and (3) use of the second-person was distracting and took me out of the story until my brain began auto-translating the pronouns from “you” to “her”.
Let’s start with the end of the world, why don’t we? Get it over with and move on to more interesting things.
First, a personal ending. There is a thing she will think over and over in the days to come, as she imagines how her son died and tries to make sense of something so innately senseless. She will cover Uche’s broken little body with a blanket—except his face, because he is afraid of the dark—and she will sit beside it numb, and she will pay no attention to the world that is ending outside. The world has already ended within her, and neither ending is for the first time. She’s old hat at this by now.
What she thinks then, and thereafter, is: But he was free.
And it is her bitter, weary self that answers this almost-question every time her bewildered, shocked self manages to produce it:
He wasn’t. Not really. But now he will be.
Listen, listen, listen well.
There was an age before the Seasons, when life and Earth, its father, thrived alike. (Life had a mother, too. Something terrible happened to Her.) Earth our father knew He would need clever life, so He used the Seasons to shape us out of animals: clever hands for making things and clever minds for solving problems and clever tongues for working together and clever sessapinae to warn us of danger. The people became what Father Earth needed, and then more than He needed. Then we turned on Him, and He has burned with hatred for us ever since.
Remember, remember, what I tell.