Meanwhile, book twos are stuck in the middle and have to carefully release a few details on the key questions-to keep readers engaged-without revealing too much and ruining the finale. The closing books of trilogies get to finally solve the mysteries for good. Book ones, in general, are allowed to introduce the most basic and exciting elements of a fantasy world to readers, enough to sink in the hooks and raise a few central mysteries to keep the reader turning the pages. This second book in the trilogy, again as is endemic to the genre, also has to do the heavy lifting for the series in terms of worldbuilding. Schaffa was once the Guardian in charge of policing Essun, Nassun’s mother, so he has a deep history with Nassun’s family that the girl is not aware of. Schaffa, however, is an ancient (as in thousands of years old) man who had worked for millennia as a Guardian, the state-sanctioned police force charged with safeguarding orogenes in the Stillness, the world of the trilogy. Nassun, an orogene like her mother, fled her hometown of Tirimo and made her way to the village of Found Moon, where she discovered a refuge for child orogenes operated by Schaffa. Essun is in Castrima, struggling to understand how to save the world.

The Obelisk Gate also maintains The Fifth Season’s structure of using three point-of-view characters however, unlike book one, where all three POV characters were actually the same person-Essun-in different stages of her life, The Obelisk Gate features three different individuals for its points of view: Essun, her daughter Nassun and a man named Schaffa. The Fifth Season boldly opened with the end of the world, but that means that The Obelisk Gate has to make do with the world that has stubbornly persisted. She is reconciling what she learned in the previous book and trying to figure out a way to deal with the newly broken world in which she lives. This book features Essun, the hero of book one, The Fifth Season, settling into her new community of Castrima. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, is no exception to this rule (for a detailed look at book one, click here). It is the characters dealing with the events of book one and preparing for the action of book three. Stuck in between these walloping crescendo moments, book two usually falls much flatter. It is almost inevitably a bridge between what was surely a cliffhanger-heavy but ultimately satisfying climax to book one-because no publisher is going to print a 500-page first-book-of-a-trilogy that does not have some decisive storytelling-and the ultimate finale to the trilogy, which is also surely momentous.

Readers of the fantasy genre often dread the second book of a trilogy.

The obelisk gate