Is The Broken Earth trilogy by N. K. Jemisin worth your time?

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]This is episode 15 of us reviewing all the fantasy series we've read so you can decide if they're worth your time. Today we are covering the Broken Earth trilogy. This is by NKGeem which starts with The Fifth Season, The Obless Gate, then The Stone Sky. So, is this series worth your time? If you want to take it down with your eyeballs, it's going to be 1424 pages. On audio, it's 43 hours and 3 minutes. And if you want to look at Goodreads ratings, it has an average of 4.29. 29. However, this woman standing right next to me, her average rating of this trilogy is five stars. Literally, it is perfection to Maddie. So, why don't you tell us why? Well, first of all, if you don't want to listen to me, every single book in this trilogy won the Hugo Award in the year that it was released. So, but apart from that, The Broken Earth is just a completely unique series. I would call it a sigh fantasy and it's very dystopian in its vibe called the fifth season because fifth seasons ravage the lands tectonic movements and volcanic eruptions and then there's these long destitute periods after fifth seasons where it's just every man for himself total survival of the fittest. There are wielders manipulate rock and shift tectonic plates. They can help during a fifth season situation, but they're also very dangerous and especially if a child has these powers. They can cause really big damage. There's an institute called the fulcrum who learn to control their powers and it kind of protects them from society because society is scared of them. So, your three points of view are a young girl going into the fulcrum, a woman who's already working for the fulcrum, and she and her mentor are on a mission, and then a mother who is searching for her daughter. Oh, I am sad. Yes. So, you rated all three of these books five stars. What was it about them that gave perfection to you?

[00:01:54]Well, book one, The Fifth Season, is just the most unique storytelling structure I think I've ever encountered in a book. At the end of book one, I remember thinking like, who's the villain? Are any of these POVs actually heroes? What's the meta plot here?

[00:02:08]What's the message? But I was so hooked.

[00:02:11]I think in any dystopian story, there's always that question of like, how did it come to this? How did we get here? And often times, the characters you're following don't know. They don't know what the collapse was. As the reader, I'm always really intrigued to find out what that was. And it's so satisfying.

[00:02:26]It just didn't feel like anything else.

[00:02:28]And it still stands out for that reason.

[00:02:29]and I haven't read anything like it since.

[00:02:33]So, we're all moving it to the top of our TBRs. Yes. I can't believe we waited till episode 15 to talk about this one.

[00:02:39]Like, I'm obsessed with the Broken Earth trilogy. What series should we do next?

[00:02:43]Oh, I think it's probably finally time to talk about some Joe Abbercrombie.