The Obelisk Gate — The Broken Earth Book 2

Two Women, Two Trajectories

The Obelisk Gate picks up where The Fifth Season ended — the world in the grip of an extinction-level Fifth Season, triggered deliberately by the rogue orogene Alabaster at the novel’s opening. Essun has found refuge in the underground comm of Castrima, a geode community powered by obelisk energy, and is learning from a dying Alabaster how to access and control the network of floating crystals that encircle the globe.

Meanwhile, her daughter Nassun — whose existence the first novel told us about but whose perspective it withheld — has her own narrative. She has been taken by her father to the settlement of Found Moon, where a Guardian named Schaffa, broken and changed by the events of the first book, is working with a group of child orogenes. Nassun, who watched her father kill her brother and who has reason to distrust the adults who claim to protect her, is developing power that exceeds Essun’s — and a set of conclusions about the world that diverge sharply from her mother’s.

The Obelisk Network

The first novel introduced the obelisks as background phenomena — enormous crystals of unknown origin floating above the Stillness, apparently inert, occasionally dangerous. The Obelisk Gate reveals that they are a network, that they were built for a specific purpose, and that Alabaster’s deliberate triggering of the Fifth Season was itself an attempt to activate that purpose. The magic system of orogeny — the geological power that defines the trilogy’s oppressed class — turns out to be connected to a technology so old that its origins have been completely forgotten.

Jemisin’s integration of the obelisk revelation into the political structure of the world is characteristic of her method: the technology and the oppression are not separate elements but aspects of a single system. The orogenes were enslaved not merely because they were feared but because they were needed for something their enslavers did not fully understand.

Mother and Daughter, Converging

The structural achievement of The Obelisk Gate is its development of Nassun as a character whose perspective is internally coherent and emotionally sympathetic even as it moves toward conclusions that readers — and Essun — will find devastating. Nassun loves her mother and has been formed by that love; she also knows things about what her mother did, and carries wounds that Essun does not know exist. Their convergence in The Stone Sky is the trilogy’s emotional endpoint, and Jemisin earns it by giving each of them a fully realized interiority in this middle volume.

The novel won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2017, making Jemisin the first author to win consecutive Hugos — a record she would extend with the trilogy’s conclusion.

Our rating: 4.4/5 — A masterful middle volume that expands the Broken Earth trilogy’s world and stakes without losing the emotional and political precision that made the first book extraordinary.