The Fifth Season Broke My No Second Person Rule

I have a rule, second person point of view basically never works for me, it usually reads like a choose your own adventure book pretending to be literary. This book has a second person thread running through it and I was ready to bounce off it in the first chapter the way one reviewer did, flatly calling out present tense plus second person as an alienating combination almost nobody pulls off. And then it just worked, somewhere around chapter three I stopped noticing the trick and started feeling it, which is a different thing entirely.

There are no wizards here, no swords, none of the usual fantasy furniture, one reviewer put it as no elves, no spells, not even any white dudes, and that’s a decent shorthand for how much this book resets your expectations of what the genre’s supposed to look like. Orogenes can calm or trigger earthquakes with their minds and are hated and used for it in equal measure, the world runs on their controlled abuse, and the book is completely upfront that this is the point, not a side detail.

A specific image that’s stuck with me since finishing it is what one reviewer called the whispering pit, I won’t spoil what that is but it’s the kind of detail that shows up once and then you can’t unsee it for the rest of the book. Some people called the pacing aimless in the middle, no real plot just dread accumulating, and I get that complaint, it’s not a fast read. But the structural twist, once it lands, recontextualizes the entire first two thirds in a way I did not see coming even though a few reviewers said they clocked it early.

Five stars, already bought the sequel, which for a guy who usually reads standalones is basically the highest compliment I’ve got.