#august read

“Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it.” – James Baldwin, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968)

A Darker Shade of Magic by V. E. Schwab

(Please remember to put spoilers for later books under a cut.) One of the main plots in The Fifth Season is Essun's quest to find her daughter. It's rare to have a mother as the main character in a SFF book - rarer still for her to prioritise other actions above her child. I enjoyed The Fifth Season's realistic and unsympathetic portrayal of Essun's relationship with her daughter immensely. I often felt as if she sought Nassun from a sense of obligation or ownership rather than true idealised parental love. I think it isn't often that we follow a character who is a mother where her motherhood is reduced to a small part of her self rather than the summation of her nature. Even as I recoiled from Essun's difficult and misguided relationship with her daughter, I appreciated it. Is Essun a mother without being maternal? If she had the choice, would she have become a mother at all? Does the exploration of her full life, before she became a mother, change the way that we perceive her relationship with her daughter and the way that we perceive her? What are your thoughts on Essun's relationship with her children and her portrayal as a mother - and mothers in SFF in general?

One small warning, though: the end ripped my heart out a bit, because we have to lose some dear characters while the fate of others is unknown. But of course that cliffhanger makes you very eager to read the last book of the series, and I gotta admit that I went to the bookstore almost immediately to get it XD

We’ll start hosting spoiler-full discussions on select topics during the third week of August. Please let us know if you have any questions or suggestions -- and enjoy the read! 

(Please remember to put spoilers for later books under a cut.) The Fifth Season is set in a world that has been conditioned into a constant state of preparation for apocalyptic events. Humans are divided into castes that carry out specific and integral functions. Cities and towns are structured in ways that make them easy to defend and self-govern as soon as seasonal-law is imposed and the rules of civilization are put on hold. This begs the question: how does society carry its history and identity forward when it is structured to break and rebuild? In the first book, we begin to realise that the seasons may have been repeating through history not just for thousands of years, but tens of thousands of years. On a world-building scale, this is immense - what was society like before the seasons? Was there a society before the seasons? What do the artefacts of the dead-civs tell us about the development of Essun's world from then to now? I was particularly taken with the way that knowledge is lost. Essun doesn't know how old her world is. She can't understand the dead-civ's language even though she inhabits structures that utilise it. Why? How was this knowledge lost? How did her society enable the loss? What did the dead-civ look like? I have never seen a post- (pre-, mid-) apocalypse work imagined along such a broad stretch of time, nor utilising the conceit of a society constantly fractured and reshaped - never given the time to become something more than groups of survivors. Did this conceit work for you? Did you feel that the loss of history was realistic - and was it deliberate, or accidental? Was the knowledge truly lost, or withheld? What are your thoughts about the structure of her society?

As I'm reading the Fifth Season for the second time rather than the first, I decided to marathon the trilogy back-to-back to get a real feel of how the pieces slot together. I'm not going to spoil in this post, though. I felt that, having now read the complete trilogy, the books coming together felt like one large novel rather than three distinct works. I wonder if any of you have any thoughts about the pace of the first book and the depth of its world building? Did it give too much, or too little? If you have read more of the series, did you feel that the later books had to compensate for this? If you've just read the first book, did you feel satisfied or frustrated?