BOOKS! (The Mutations + In Love & Trouble)

RIP, Toffee. Nice meeting you.

Finally! I finally finished reading something (TWO somethings!) this year, I finally finished a pair of short books that I've been planning to pair together since I got them back in AUGUST, and I'm finally writing a new book review for the first in in 2023. Both of the following are works of fiction that I bought on August 12th, at a Detroit independent bookstore called 27th Letter Books. I remember the date because that was the day my friend Marlee had her farewell dinner in Detroit before moving to New York for grad school, and I made a point of spending hours browsing at 27th Letter beforehand because Marlee had been recommending that place to me for ages. (Thanks, Marlee!) 

 

In my post-Broken Earth recovery I tried to keep my most recent review of Before I Let Go "brief" and... we see how that went. But I mean it this time! These reads are short (under 200 pages each), and I need to move on with my life and tackle so many other books that I've kept waiting, so I'm going to keep this review as close to my version of concise as possible. First up, a darkly humorous Mexican novel about a lawyer slowly dying from tongue cancer, and the multiple people caring for him. And then, a story collection by THE Alice Walker about Black women, mostly Southern, finding love and tragedy in the same places.

 

The Mutations by Jorge Comensal 

(Translated from Spanish by Charlotte Whittle)

I bought this book because a dog told me to. While I was in the fiction section of 27th Letter, this was the book I happened to be contemplating when I felt a nose lightly nudging against my left leg. I looked down to see Toffee, the 14-year-old red nose pit bull who belonged to one of the bookstore employees. (I say belonged in past tense because I just looked up 27th Letter's Instagram account and saw an announcement from February 12th that Toffee has sadly passed away. Rest in peace, Toffee!) She was sniffing me out like she would apparently do to every customer before inevitably losing interest and going off to do her own thing in the store; that day, her own thing was crying for her mom while mom popped in and out of the building to do yard work. Being intercepted by Toffee, who looked so much like an older and thinner version of my own red nose pit bull Julia, seemed as good a sign as any to take home what I already had in my hand. Since the store had so many enticing selections, and I was having trouble making up my mind anyway. Plus I'd be trying something new (Mexican literature)!

 

Ramón is nearly 50 years old and works as a lawyer in Mexico City. In other words, from arguing in court to charming his clients, Ramón talks for a living. Until he suddenly discovers a painful and cancerous tumor on his tongue, and the only viable treatment is to have his tongue surgically removed. Losing the ability to speak is not only the end of his law career, but the beginning of what is ultimately the final year of his life as his cancer eventually resists treatment, spreads to his lungs and elsewhere, and becomes terminal. His wife Carmela (who also worked as a lawyer previously) oversees his care at home with the assistance of the family's talkative and pious but well-meaning (...?) maid Elodia, while his teenaged children become increasingly depressed. (Mateo holes up in his room to touch himself and spend hours on the Internet, while Paulina goes from binge-eating to barely eating at all.) Meanwhile, Ramón communicates by writing things down and making disapproving faces, and he secretly plots to set his family up to be financially secure before dying by suicide. (Slight spoiler: Ramón ultimately does die, but not by suicide, and someone in his household has something to do with it.) The lovebird on this book's cover represents Benito, the endangered parrot that Elodia buys illegally to cheer Ramón up, because he's miserable and has made the household miserable as a result. And surprisingly, this works. The parrot's vocabulary consists of cuss words and dirty phrases that he loudly squawks when he's in a good mood, which is only when Ramón is around.

 

Although Ramón's family features heavily in The Mutations, the chapters mainly alternate between his perspective and those of two other people who are preoccupied with the history, nature, and experience of cancer for their own complex reasons: his oncologist Dr. Aldama, and his therapist Teresa. The titular mutations in Ramón's cancer cells are bewilderingly unusual, so much so that Aldama hopes that studying them will garner him widespread acclaim for making a ground-breaking scientific discovery (if not curing cancer, then at least reaching an unprecedented understanding of how cancer works). As for Teresa, she has a convenient excuse to never move on from her own bout with breast cancer because she now counsels cancer patients and survivors for a living. She operates her therapy practice—and her own cannabis greenhouse, administering some patients medicinal marijuana on the low because weed isn't fully legalized in Mexico—inside her house.

 

I am more sentimental than I usually like to admit, which means I'm always trying to pick out some sort of meaning or symbolism from my reading experiences, and on multiple occasions I've written about feeling like I "was meant to" read a certain book at a certain time. (The Fisher King, Nowhere Is a Place, and the Broken Earth trilogy immediately come to mind.) But sometimes it's just true! Like it is for The Mutations! First, as previously mentioned, there was my encounter with Toffee, which I took as a sign to buy the book. That was in August, and I started reading the book in September. So there I was, very leisurely reading this novel about how much it sucks to be a patient, how demanding it is to be a caregiver, the obstinate mystery that is cancer, and what wisdom or raw truths or even levity can be gleaned from these very particular forms of suffering. And then, my mom wound up going in and out of the hospital every month from October to February—not because of anything quite as dire as cancer, but it was still a terrifying time. Which meant my mom was (is kinda still) experiencing how much it sucks to be a patient, and I was (am kinda still) experiencing how demanding it is to be a caregiver! And all the while I'm still reading snatches of this book about illness and suffering. I'm just saying... my whole trajectory with this book from August 2022 to February 2023 doesn't seem merely coincidental to me! I honestly feel like God knew I would need the added humor and perspective to accompany me during what was to come, and Toffee noncommittally stepped in with the assist so that I wouldn't leave 27th Letter without those things.

 

Now. Given the story I just told, did I derive any sense of comfort from reading The Mutations? Distraction, release, sure. But comfort? Not exactly. The novel does aim to make readers laugh, and laugh I did. However, I don't think it's necessarily concerned with making readers—or any of the characters, for that matter—feel better. Some life events, such as a cancer diagnosis, simply suck. They might discombobulate or refine our priorities, establish a relationship of care and empathy deeper than we've ever known, and raise some excellent food for thought... but there's no definitive "feeling better" in situations like the specific ones presented in The Mutations. Jorge Comensal denies us that, and you know what? I don't mind it, because it still made me laugh. If you're interested in stories set in Mexico written by Mexican authors, literature translated from Spanish, disability and non-verbal communication caused by illness, family mess, sarcasm, abrupt endings, or why cancer does what it does and what it all means (if it means anything at all), then read this book!

Favorite quotes:

 "'Why me?' asked most of her patients, as they tried to comprehend the scale of their misfortune, but Teresa, who years earlier had consigned that narcissistic question to the garbage, tried to lead them down a different path, into the basement of unfulfilled desires that fed their fear of oblivion" (17).

"Good health wasn't a state of peace and harmony with the environment, as naturopathic quack healers proclaimed. In fact, it was quite the opposite—a fleeting victory over chaos, a balancing act on a tightrope stretched over an abyss of turmoil. The 'health' touted on TV was the opium of a century of narcissists, an effective illusion for marketing vitamins, salads, and activewear, but useless for understanding the body's relationship to the world. Just like the plague and tuberculosis in other eras, cancer revealed this 'natural balance' to be a gargantuan sham, the missing clothes of an emperor not only naked but wasting away" (119-120).

"He understood her anger: she had done everything she could, and the doctor had let her down. Nevertheless, it wasn't his job to apologize like a hotel manager to an unsatisfied guest. Medicine was a rudimentary and to a large extent intuitive trade, from which it was impossible to expect perfect results" (151).

 "'No, Ramón,' she said gravely, 'they're going to miss you. It'll be a huge loss for them... there's something really important you still need to do for them. Say goodbye slowly, teach them how to say goodbye. Nobody tells you this, but it's something that can be learned. My grandmother taught us how... She gave us all a gift and told us all something special. It was a master class in farewells... You can't abandon your children just like that, otherwise how will they know what to do when their own time comes?'" (166).

 

In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women by Alice Walker

 

I bought this book because I found it among the $10 shelves at 27th Letter, and I realized that the only work I'd ever read by Alice Walker was The Color Purple. (I do have a copy of Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart that I bought from my local library's book sale a few years ago, but it's still tucked away in my room.) No elderly pit bulls involved in my decision with this one. In 13 stories, told mostly from female characters' perspectives, Walker portrays Black women and girls who do not receive the love that they need and deserve. More pointedly, any notion of protecting their innocence, or obtaining romantic and mutually-fulfilling love with a male figure, largely takes a backseat to surviving the clutches of racism and the weight of those male figures' overbearing desires. Most of these stories take place in the South during varying periods of the 20th century up to presumably the 1970s, given that this collection was first published in 1973. With that said, one story is partially set in New York City ("Entertaining God"), and another is set in Uganda ("The Diary of an African Nun"). I'll be focusing on my favorites, which are "Really, Doesn't Crime Pay?", "The Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff", and "The Diary of an African Nun".

 

"Really, Doesn't Crime Pay?" features a housewife named Myrna who's stashed away over 20 years' worth of her own secret writings. In 1958, she has an affair with a traveling writer named Mordecai after he reads and commends the quality of her ideas, only for him to steal her best work and publish it as his own in a magazine. (He left promising that he'd take Myrna's work back North with him to get it published so she could become a famous author.) The betrayal—along with the depression she'd already sunken into waiting for Mordecai's return—leads Myrna to attempt murder on her husband with a chainsaw, after which she is institutionalized. After her release in 1961 (the present), she finds ways to amuse herself until she's ready to leave her husband for good. Like secretly taking birth control pills (frustrating her husband's baby-making efforts), using his ideal of a wife against him by buying excessively clothes she'll never wear, and indulging in copious beauty products to make her skin soft and her body smell sweet. As someone who has squirreled away over 10 years' worth of songs that I've written but have let almost no one hear, I related to Myrna's sensitivity and was exceedingly amused by the petty and willful ways she chose to resist her situation.

The titular Hannah in "The Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff" is a woman who suffered public humiliation, starvation, abandonment by her husband, the deaths of her four young children, and accelerated grief-induced aging because a white woman administrator refused to redeem her and her family's food stamps during the Great Depression, claiming they were dressed too well to need help. Now in 1963, Hannah requests that a pair of rootworker women curse the now-wealthy white woman with a miserable death, so that Hannah can at least die with a sense of justice, having regained some of the pride that she lost. (Spoiler: the white woman is dead within a year.) This story is a tribute to Zora Neale Hurston, and the "curse-prayer" that the rootworker women have Hannah recite twice a day for nine days is verbatim the same curse-prayer that Hurston originally included in her 1936 book Mules and Men, which presented her anthropological research on African-American folklore. A fictional story of divine revenge, avenging racism that has devastating material and spiritual consequences, based around actual documentation of Black folklore? It's maddening and heartbreaking yet exhilarating at the same time!  

 

In fact, "Hannah Kemhuff" is what finally made me pay attention to Walker's use of certain In Love & Trouble stories to implore Black Americans to cherish rather than forsake our traditions and ancestral knowledge. Whether that be by actually using family heirlooms that were made to be used rather than museum-ified ("Everyday Use"), respecting country ways of living, or even employing rootwork and home remedies as alternative methods for obtaining the care and healing that we have been denied ("Hannah Kemhuff" and "Strong Horse Tea"). Because even as we've been cut off from so much of our origins, we do still have ancestral knowledge to keep passing down, rooted in the cultures and communities we've cultivated out of necessity in the South. Even if characters or readers have no desire to replicate such traditions in their own lives, the traditions and the reasons why Black people have turned to them are still worth contemplating deeply. They're still worth remembering on purpose.

 

And then there's this additional mind-blower called "The Diary of an African Nun", about an unnamed celibate nun living and working at a mission school that moonlights as a hotel for Americans and Europeans, in an area of her Ugandan village that's set apart from her people. Having become a nun when she was 20 years old, she now reflects on her decision to convert, her longing to partake in the festivities of her people again, and her desire for physical intimacy that she's no longer allowed to have. She even refers to sex as "the oldest dance", and highlights the indigenous life-bringing sensuality of her people's dance rituals, their chanting, their goat-eating, and the snow melting down the Ruwenzori mountains every spring to provide water for bathing and farming. All of this in contrast with Christianity (specifically Catholicism in this case), which requires that Ugandans convert (dead themselves, die in spirit) or be penalized in some brutal way (suffer materially, die in the flesh). As someone caught between African (Black) and Western (white) religious traditions, the nun questions why faith should be mutually exclusive from eroticism and reverence for the natural, and she sorrowfully acknowledges her role in subjugating her own people through spreading the Gospel. Fully aware of how deceitful and destructive assimilation will be, she still views teaching her people to assimilate (to convert like she did) as her only recourse to protect them from being completely wiped out by colonization in the forms of religion and tourism, which aren't leaving Africa or making fewer demands anytime soon. If ever.

In Love & Trouble ends with "To Hell with Dying", where an unnamed woman fondly recalls a grandfather figure from her youth named Mr. Sweet. He was her alcoholic guitar-playing neighbor who was beloved by many, and who her family regularly "revived" whenever he came close to dying, which was often. As children, she and her siblings would be brought to Mr. Sweet to shower him with affection and enthusiasm that would awaken him and make him keep living for a while longer. This continued until the narrator, as a 24-year-old doctoral student in New England, was called down home to witness 90-year-old Mr. Sweet dying for the final time. But he made sure to set aside his guitar in advance, just for the narrator to have and keep. So even if some readers might regard In Love & Trouble as too raw, or a downer, because they were seeking something lovey-dovey or underestimated the "trouble" part of the title, Walker is gracious enough to at least conclude the collection with a story that's tragic like all the others, but also heartwarming and... sweet (pun intended). If "unlucky in love" is a vast understatement for you or the women you know, if you believe Black women and girls still deserve better than what they are given, or if you simply want to read more of Alice Walker's work, then read this book!

Favorite quotes:

"He took me in his arms, right there in the grape arbor... After that, a miracle happened. Under Mordecai's fingers my body opened like a flower and carefully bloomed. And it was strange as well as wonderful. For I don't think love had anything to o with this at all." (from "Really, Doesn't Crime Pay?", p. 17)

 

"I gloat over this knowledge. Now Ruel will find that I am not a womb without a brain that can be bought with Japanese bathtubs and shopping sprees. The moment of my deliverance is at hand!" (from "Really, Doesn't Crime Pay?", p. 18)

 

"She will read every one of the thick books in her arms, and they are not books she is required to read. She is trying to feel the substance of what other people have learned. To digest it until it becomes like bread and sustains her. She is the hungriest girl in the school." (from "We Drink the Wine in France", p. 123)

 

"His eyes would get all misty and he would sometimes cry out loud, but we never let it embarrass us, for he knew that we loved him and that we sometimes cried too for no reason." (from "To Hell with Dying", p. 134)

ドラマ (Dorama) Time! 30

Happy New Year! Since this is my first time really writing something new in 2023, I figure I owe y'all that greeting. I meant to have new reviews out in January, seeing as how it was my 10th anniversary month and all, but the month got too hectic for me to write about anything. (Truth be told, I've had the October-January from hell, and February's looking like it might have beef with me too, but y'all didn't come here for those specifics.) I couldn't even finish reading anything last month! However, I did finish watching my most recent and very short Japanese drama roster, so here I am writing the 30th edition of my J-drama review series,"ドラマ (Dorama) Time!". Of the fall 2022 offerings I only had two J-dramas I was interested in, plus I did my own little 'Shinya Shokudō' retrospective where I set out to watch every episode ever made (re-watching the original three seasons and then watching the two Netflix seasons for the first time; thankfully Netflix has all five seasons). Here goes!

 

サイレント (Sairento/Silent) - Fuji TV/2022

• 
  Tsumugi (Kawaguchi Haruna from 'Kikazaru Koi') and Sou were high school sweethearts whose relationship was aided by their mutual friend Minato. (Minato was best friends with both and had feelings for Tsumugi, but kept those feelings to himself when he realized that Tsumugi had a crush on Sou.) Tsumugi fell for Sou's voice when he read an essay of his at a school assembly, and as a couple they bonded over their shared love of music (especially the band Spitz). 
• But then Sou got diagnosed with hearing loss soon after the trio's graduation, and he was so overwhelmed that he hid his disability from his hometown friends by moving to Tokyo for college. After going completely deaf in college, Sou broke up with Tsumugi via a text claiming he'd fallen for someone else, when really he loved her so much that he believed it'd be too painful for both of them to no longer hear each other's voices or enjoy music together like before. Now, in the present, eight years have passed, and Tsumugi shares an apartment in Tokyo with her little brother while working at a record store and dating Minato. She thinks she's over Sou and is about to move in with Minato, until she unexpectedly reunites with Sou at a subway station on her way to an apartment viewing. 
• Tsumugi almost immediately begins taking sign language classes to better communicate with Sou, and Minato—grateful to have his best friend back and sensing that Sou and Tsumugi's romance might eventually be rekindled—amicably breaks up with Tsumugi before his own potential resentment and jealousy can ruin the trio's renewed friendship. As the series approaches its conclusion, seemingly everyone in Tsumugi and Sou's lives is asking them, "Why aren't y'all together?" The lead exes do want each other back, but can they make a relationship between a hearing person and a non-hearing person work? Can Sou stop fixating on what they've lost and still might lose enough to give their love another chance?
  

Meh: The following isn't necessarily a demerit against the show, but rather an acknowledgement of my own misguided expectations. While Tsumugi and Sou becoming girlfriend and boyfriend again is an endgame of the series, 'Silent' is less about their romance and more about what it's like to be a deaf Japanese person. Sou's character is our main entry into this, but we also learn about this experience through his only deaf friend (a woman named Nana who was born deaf and who taught Sou sign language, played by Kaho from 'Love Song' and 'Kare, Otto, Otoko Tomodachi'), Tsumugi's sign language teacher (a hearing man who chose his profession after becoming close with Nana during their college years), and Sou's family (of which his mother played by Shinohara Ryoko and his younger sister put the most effort into learning sign language for him). To be clear, I deeply respect and appreciate that the creators of 'Silent' chose to focus more on the lives, frustrations, and dignity of deaf people than on creating another run-of-the-mill love story, because all of that was enlightening to me as a hearing viewer. I merely wish that Tsumugi and Sou's love story had a little more oomf to it, that's all. A teaspoon more of passion, maybe. Everyone's just a little too mature about everything. The love triangle gets dismantled just a little too smoothly. Tsumugi and Sou are just a little too chill with each other.

Better: Again, this is more about me than the show itself, but I like that Tsumugi and Sou's last names sound like plant names even though they aren't. Officially, Tsumugi's last name Aoba is written 青羽 and not 青葉 ("fresh leaves" or "green leaves") like I assumed before looking it up just now. Sou's last name Sakura (佐倉 and not 桜 like I assumed) has nothing to do with cherry blossoms. Nonetheless, isn't it adorable to think about a "Miss Greenleaf" and a "Mr. Cherry Blossom" falling in love with each other not once, but twice? And Sou's full name written in hiragana (さくらそう) or katakana (サクラソウ) means "primrose"! As in the flower! Maybe I'm just having a language nerd moment, but something in there's got to be intentional on the screenwriter's part, right? 

 

On a separate note, I was surprised but glad to see Itagaki Rihito playing Tsumugi's little brother Hikaru. After witnessing him play the disturbingly young romantic (?) lead in 'Shijuukara', it was a relief to see him acting alongside more people closer to his age range. I mean good on him for challenging himself with that show, but his character in 'Silent' comes across much less like an overly intense, emotionally tortured, baby-looking young man, and for his sake and mine I am thankful.

 

Best: Oh my goodness, Meguro Ren (playing Sakura Sou) is such an excellent crier! That scene at the end of episode 1 where Tsumugi finally tracks Sou down after her initial sighting of him at the subway station, and he tries to walk away from her but she catches up to him and starts talking to him, and he's signing to her in response and sobbing from the distress of them not being able to understand each other before walking off? I was locked in from that moment forward.

 

モダンラブ・東京～さまざまな愛の形 (Modanrabu・Tokyo ～ Love in Its Many Forms/Modern Love Tokyo) - Amazon Prime/2022

• 
  'Modern Love Tokyo' presents seven episodes of people finding, expressing, rediscovering, or holding onto love in Tokyo. Each episode features a different couple. 
• This is one of multiple Asian adaptations of the American, largely NYC-focused, romantic anthology series 'Modern Love' that were released in 2022. 

Meh: Whereas I felt like I was clearly watching a TV anthology when I saw 'Modern Love' (and this Anne Hathaway scene from season 1 cemented my endearment for the series), watching 'Modern Love Tokyo' felt like sitting through a collection of short films, which made the series drag a bit. With that said, the only episode I can honestly say I disliked was episode 5, where a female journalist gets catfished by an unhoused man for two weeks, finds out, and wants to continue dating him because of their genuine connection. That episode dragged the most, and toward the end I couldn't tell what was real and what was in the journalist's imagination, or what I was meant to understand from what she may have been imagining. 

 

And while it felt progressive to see Mizukawa Asami ('Double Fantasy') and Maeda Atsuko playing a lesbian couple raising two young children together in episode 1, I didn't sense much chemistry between their characters. 

Better: Episode 6 is super cute! Naomi Scott plays a British woman temporarily hustling in LA who becomes unexpectedly smitten with one of her online English students, an advanced learner and grad student who studies corn (played by Ikematsu Sosuke). They continue communicating after his lesson subscription ends, and she even flies to Tokyo to spend time with him in person. Both of these lead actors impressed me, as this was my first encounter with Naomi Scott's acting (I only knew of her as a singer before she became Disney's live-action Jasmine), and I had no idea that Ikematsu Sosuke could not only speak English well but act well in English too. This episode is almost completely in English, and also references all the proceeding episodes and their main characters at the end, which makes me think that this was meant to be the final episode. Perhaps episode 7 is a bonus that the production team decided to add to the season later on.

Speaking of bonuses, I also thoroughly enjoyed episode 7, the shortest and the only anime episode of 'Modern Love Tokyo'. In it, an office worker named Tamami who doesn't feel special often spends time at a bar drinking wine and doodling. When the bartender unknowingly plays her favorite song from high school ("You May Dream" by Sheena & The Rokkets), Tamami reminisces about her short-lived romance with one of her schoolmates. Back then, she found a boy named Rin playing that song on the piano in their school's empty gym/auditorium, and they bonded over being Sheena & The Rokkets fans. Thinking about that time also reminds adult Tamami of how her art teacher encouraged her to have confidence in her skills, which motivates her to start posting her drawings on Instagram. She gains a following there, which leads her to reconnect with Rin, who's a professional musician now.

Best: Episode 4, hands down. Kaho (Sou's deaf friend in 'Silent') stars as a depressed graphic designer named Mai. Her debilitating depression forces her to take an extended break from work, and her dog groomer husband Kengo looks after her as she spends months at home wallowing, because wallowing (in addition to therapy and medication) is part of her healing process. That episode depicts depression so well, and it does so with a bit of humor and without relying on dim lighting and dark colors! Mai spending sleepless nights blaming herself for everything that's wrong in her life (work stress, co-workers sneak dissing her) and outside of her life (polar bears potentially starving to extinction, whales dying from consuming plastic garbage, forests dying from acid rain, cars polluting the air) seems ridiculous. Until you remember that one time in April 2019 when Notre Dame was burning and you burst into tears, not for Notre Dame, but because you couldn't help bemoaning how nothing ever lasts. (Indeed, that is a true story of mine.) Sometimes depression translates the sense of "I feel helpless, and that makes me feel frustrated and scared and not in control" into "everything is my fault," which results in people like Mai blaming themselves for things that don't make sense to non-depressed people. And episode 4 displays that phenomenon in a serious but quirky way.

 

I also love how Kengo is willing to repeatedly affirm for Mai (because she asks him many times) that he won't divorce her, that he'll never hate her, and that he's going to stay by her side even if she spends most of her time laying around crying and her hair smells from lack of washing. Because he loves her, and as he reframes it, she's just "hibernating" for now. He provides the stability she needs to eventually come back to herself, and he sticks by her because he sincerely wants to, not just because he feels like it's his husbandly duty. And as an extra sprinkle on top, Mai and Kengo have the most adorable pug, who gets frequent camera time and adds a sweet touch to this heavy story.

Honorable Mention: Shinya Shokudō (seasons 1-3)/Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories (seasons 4-5) - Netflix

Toward the end of July 2022, I randomly got inspired to watch 'Shinya Shokudō' from beginning to end. I'd already viewed all three of the original seasons (see my reviews for S1, S2, S3), and I'd been meaning to get around to the two additional Netflix seasons for years and just kept putting it off. So I finally stopped putting it off, but I started over from the beginning first. Five seasons, with ten episodes per season, spanning from 2009 to 2019, viewed by me from July 2022 to January 2023. 

Each episode is under half an hour long, but it took me a while to finish all 50 of them because I would only watch this show when I was eating. 'Shinya Shokudō' tends to be quite mellow and cozy-feeling, and since I'd already seen most of it previously, I figured watching it while eating my meals would help maintain my attention span as I progressed through the series. I wouldn't always remember to turn the show on when I sat down to eat, but I remembered often enough to start mentally referring to my viewing sessions as, "Let's eat and cry while watching other people eat and cry." (There's a lot of eating and crying on this show, y'all.)

Even though I'm not left with any more affection or nostalgia for 'Shinya Shokudō' than I already had before, there are no words to describe how powerful it was for me to see the "Cream Stew" episode (S2E6) again. I saw the young sex worker in the all-white suit and her white shoes and her updo come on screen, and memories of studying that episode and its script in class with Matsuhima-sensei at JCMU came flooding back to me. That was the episode that started it all, that inspired me to seek out the rest of the series in the first place, so taking that episode in anew meant a lot to me. 

I can't say that the Netflix seasons add anything spectacularly new to the series overall, and that was probably intentional on the production team's part since aside from brighter lighting and clearer film resolution, the visual and tonal continuity between seasons 1-3 and seasons 4-5 is pretty seamless. The ending theme songs are switched out almost every season, but "Omoide" by Suzuki Tsunekichi (RIP) reigns as the opening theme song for every single episode. With everything that matters about the show remaining the same, much of the plot being centralized inside or around one location (the titular diner run by everybody's favorite gangster-turned-chef), and many of the same actors making multiple appearances... honestly the most obvious signs of change and the passage of time that I noticed were the cellphones that characters used. You glimpse the full gamut of how cell phone technology in Japan evolved from 2009 to 2019, and I don't know why that's so fascinating to me, but it is. 

So there you have it, a shorter than usual J-drama roster this time around. If I had to pick a favorite between the two new shows I watched—which I do, because I always pick a favorite when reviewing J-dramas—I'd have to give it to 'Silent'. Even though it didn't give me what I was looking for romance-wise and was pretty subdued as a whole, learning more about deafness and the deaf community in Japan made seeing the show worth it. The care and dignity with which it's written are top notch, and watching the film CODA (2022 Oscar winner for Best Picture) in the midst of watching 'Silent' made me appreciate the latter even more. Give it a try if you are interested in representations of disability in media, prefer gentle love stories, or want to hear "Subtitle" by Higedan again and again.

 Now, off I go to find more J-dramas!

10th Anniversary of DeelaSees

Well now! Today somehow makes 10 WHOLE ENTIRE YEARS since I started this blog. On January 19th, 2013 I was a college sophomore who had just turned 20 and had so many hopes for... welp. And I tried so hard to... oop. Never mind. Let's not dwell on that. Or those. Any of those.

Now, on January 19th, 2023 I'm a month and a half past 30 and... I don't know. That's the only answer I can think to give to any question that I might have for myself, or that anyone might have for me. I simply, truly, with astounding bafflement and searing disbelief, do not know.

In the first collaboration (of now two!) that I did with my book blogger friend Rachel, I mentioned how this blog has changed and how my future plans for it—other than to keep doing like I been doing as best I can—were uncertain. DeelaSees started out as an online diary of sorts. Then after I graduated from undergrad, my life seemed to get a lot less interesting (plus I got deep into pen-and-paper journaling and became increasingly wary of oversharing here), so I focused on continuing to write book reviews and J-drama reviews. And in that 2019 collaboration with Rachel, I mentioned potentially sunsetting this blog and starting a new one upon turning 30, keeping DeelaSees available as a record (relic?) of my 20s. And I still would like to do that, if my means and the events of 2023 permit. 

(Maybe something like a professional website or an online portfolio, with my real name all over everything, is overdue? This blog is its own website, Young, Gifted and Abroad is another, I own the domains for both. But maybe it's time, been time, for an all-encompassing site that showcases all my work as well as me the person?)

But until then, I say all of the above to say this: Yeah, DeelaSees is 10 years old, and Danielle Grace—me, the person who created this blog, hey, hello again—is still here. I am still here. A lot less has changed than I assumed would by now, especially in the ways I assumed. But in the meantime and in between time, I'll continue to be here, writing my reviews... for now. And if you're still here to pick up what I put down? Then thank you!

BOOKS! (Before I Let Go)

Why am I putting out a book review on Christmas Eve, you ask? Well. I'm not going to see my family in Louisville for Christmas this year because I have to help my mom recover from something (long story), and the only holiday-related plan I have for this weekend is to make a butter pecan cake for just me and Ma. (My cousin requested it since she's hosting Christmas dinner at her house, and I'd already gotten the ingredients before I knew that I wouldn't be there.) I just finished this romance novel the other day, the day before winter officially started, so I figured why not write about it before December is over? I'm reviewing this book by itself, in the foolish hope that within the next week I'll actually finish and review two short books that I've been planning to pair together since late summer.

Before I Let Go by Kennedy Ryan

Before I Let Go has been all the rage on social media especially during this final quarter of 2022, but the draw for me was specifically the way I saw Nichole Perkins (Sometimes I Trip on How Happy We Could Be) posting about it back in August. Most notably, I remember Perkins commending BILG's "grown folks steaminess" (underscored by four red hot pepper emojis), and remarking how Kennedy Ryan writes like someone who has a Southern grandmother. Such praise already had me convinced, and then somewhere online I came across this line from chapter 39 that further sold me on BILG beyond any potential doubt:

"'This body gave me my children,' I tell her, sliding down to lift her knees over my shoulders. 'And it will always be beautiful to me'" (329).

What's even left to deliberate after reading something like that? So I pre-ordered BILG ahead of its mid-November release. (When I finally got around to ordering, I was actually just about to get Octavia Butler's Kindred because I knew the TV adaptation would be coming out before year's end, but I was also eyeballs-deep in the Broken Earth trilogy and didn't think I could handle another story about slavery so soon, so I opted for something lovey-dovey to take the edge off instead.)

For the longest, Yasmen and Josiah Wade were the epitome of #BlackLove, #CoupleGoals. HBCU grads who got together when they were broke, built a thriving business together in Atlanta (Grits, a soul food restaurant based on the recipes of Aunt Byrd, who raised Josiah), had two kids and another on the way. But then Yasmen and Josiah were visited by death, twice, in relatively quick succession: Aunt Byrd died suddenly of a heart attack (Josiah was the one who found her body), and their third child Henry was stillborn after Yasmen accidentally tripped and fell alone at the restaurant and couldn't get help right away. These losses sent Yasmen into a depression where it took everything in her just to stay alive and make sure her kids were taken care of, whereas Josiah went into overdrive shouldering all the administrative and financial burdens of keeping Grits going. Grits just barely survived, but Yasmen and Josiah's marriage didn't; the fighting became too much, Yasmen resented Josiah for refusing to go to therapy and embrace his grief, and Josiah resented Yasmen for retreating within herself and wanting to chance another dangerous pregnancy to replace Henry. During a particularly raw confrontation full of low blows, Yasmen insisted on a divorce in hopes that it would put an end to their fighting and lessen the pain they were in, not realizing that pushing Josiah away like that would break his heart the most.

Now, almost two years since their divorce, Yasmen and Josiah seem to be moving on. They're co-parenting their 13-year-old daughter Deja and 10-year-old son Kassim. Yasmen's made new best friends through attending yoga classes, and time, therapy, and antidepressants have made it possible for her to return to co-running Grits and planning events for their neighborhood's community association. Josiah has moved into Aunt Byrd's house with Aunt Byrd's dog (a Great Dane named Otis, after Otis Redding) and is dating Vashti, Grits' head chef. But then Yasmen begins feeling quietly jealous as Josiah and Vashti become more involved with each other, so she starts dating a white politician named Mark who's been crushing on her for ages, which in turn makes Josiah quietly jealous. All the while, these exes are each having annoyingly vivid and persistent sex memories about each other. And all the while, everyone around them peeps their lingering affection for each other, even as Yas and Si stubbornly insist that they are over.

And then, during a disagreement in their shared office at Grits, Yasmen gets in Josiah's face, and the heat of that moment has both of their defenses slowly unraveling over the weeks that follow. And then, as staff and family gather at Yasmen's for Thanksgiving (Josiah and Vashti included), she and Josiah each get privately nostalgic about the times they used to share together. In fact, Josiah is so moved by tasting Yasmen's successful attempt at Aunt Byrd's stuffing dressing recipe, and so flustered by what to do with his latent feelings for his ex-wife, that he breaks up with Vashti that same night. And then, Yasmen and Josiah have to take an overnight trip together to Charlotte to scope out a potential second location for Grits, they're forced to stay in the same hotel room, and after finally starting to have an honest conversation about where they each went wrong in their marriage and how they've coped with losing Henry, Yasmen kisses Josiah. Josiah agrees to have sex with her, but only once so they can get each other out of their systems, and then move on like nothing ever happened. They actually do the do twice that night, but who's counting? (I am.)

They uphold their deal upon returning to Atlanta, but as the holiday season continues on and a new year arrives, Yasmen finally admits to herself that she wants her ex-husband back. Then "once" in Charlotte leads to another time in Yasmen's garage in the backseat of her car, another time in the backstage area of their kids' private school's auditorium, and several times in Yasmen's bedroom (the one they used to share) when their kids aren't home. They agree to keep their trysts casual, secret, and exclusive, but it's difficult for them to think of each other as strictly casual sex partners when they're both falling hopelessly in love with each other all over again. (Even as Josiah shuns the idea of fully getting back with Yasmen, because he can't allow himself to trust that she genuinely wants him and won't cast him aside again.) Will Yasmen and Josiah get back together for real? Can they recapture what they once had? Or maybe this is a rare opportunity for their relationship to become something different altogether? Not merely a second chance, but a chance to develop something even deeper, more honest, more vulnerable, and more enduring than they ever thought possible?

I recently did a new collaboration with my book blogger friend Rachel called "Beloved Bookishness" —similar to a famous book column that rhymes with Elf Wife—and in response to the prompt "Book That is Like Comfort Food (ex. A Read That is Chicken Soup For The Soul)", I wrote the following:

I’ve been reading Kennedy Ryan’s Before I Let Go since Thanksgiving, and “warm” is the first word I can think of to describe it. It’s a steamy romance novel about a divorced Black couple in Atlanta (who are also co-parents and restaurant co-owners) gravitating back towards each other after suffering huge losses, so it’s warm in that obvious lovey-dovey, will-they-won’t-they-oh-they-definitely-will sense. But it’s also about grieving, going to therapy, cooking and eating soul food, loving your people, and engaging with your community (or your overlapping communities) in a real way. There’s plenty of angst and longing and regret, but there’s also an abundance of tenderness and Black people (especially Black women) in the South just being themselves. All of that, plus the burnt orange background and the Black woman with the smoky eye and gigantic afro featured on the cover, make Before I Let Go feel invitingly warm. Its essence is warmth, just like comfort food.

That essentially sums up how I feel about the book. After writing endlessly about the Broken Earth trilogy the past few months, I'm trying to re-teach myself how to keep my reviews relatively short. (Or "short" for me, at least.) However, I do have some additional thoughts. 

Admittedly, I think this romance novel is brilliant, but I don't love it as much as I hoped I would. Chapters vary between Josiah's and Yasmen's perspectives, but overall the novel skews toward Yasmen's side of things. And with the romances I choose, while it's not a requirement, usually I can put myself in the female protagonist's shoes. Like, Okay sis, I get where you're coming from. I see what he's working with. That's OUR man now. I was rooting for Yasmen and Josiah to reconcile, and that garage scene was certainly something special, but generally I didn't get the same thrill from them getting it on as I usually get from reading sex scenes. Maybe something about Josiah as a person was throwing me off? Like, I wanted Yasmen to get her man back, but I didn't want Josiah myself. Maybe he and I are too similar in our resistance against attaching to things/people for fear of inevitably losing them, and that's what made him appeal to me less? I don't know. It probably has more to do with my own stuff than how Kennedy Ryan wrote him. 

 

Still, there are plenty of other things that I do immensely appreciate about BILG. By the end, every member of the Wade family, a Black family, has their own therapist in addition to attending family counseling together! Yasmen has already been seeing her therapist to heal from her severe depression after losing Henry. Kassim's teacher recommends therapy to address his fear of death/the future and make him emotionally ready to skip a grade, and Josiah finally agrees to see a therapist of his own to demonstrate to Kassim that therapy isn't so scary. And eventually Deja decides that she doesn't want to be the odd one out, so Yasmen and Josiah find a therapist for her too. I also admire how the book handles Yasmen dealing with the consequences of what she did during her depressive episode, without making it "let's beat up on Yasmen time". As someone who also has depression, I can relate to thinking you're making the best decision at the time, or are even doing the people around you a favor, only to emerge from an episode feeling disoriented because it seems like someone else was in the pilot seat while you were asleep, and now you have to pick up the pieces. It's not until Yasmen talks through wanting Josiah back with her therapist that she realizes the full extent to which she hurt him and blew up their lives (as a couple and as a family) by demanding a divorce. And while her therapist explains that depressed decision-making can't be trusted because depression is a liar, her therapist also encourages Yasmen to forgive herself and find a way to move forward, since the depressed version of her will always be there. Luckily for Yasmen, moving forward includes her and her ex-husband figuring out how to make things right with each other.

 

And while it wouldn't have been my first choice, I thought it was so daring and fresh for Ryan to pose the idea of Yasmen and Josiah getting back together without remarrying (or at least not remarrying right away). In a subplot that I didn't realize was foreshadowing, Yasmen and Josiah learn during their Charlotte trip that the older couple interested in selling their restaurant to them have never been married, despite being in a committed relationship for 30 years and having adult children and a business together. For their part, Yasmen and Josiah still believe in marriage, but what cements their reconciliation is not a proposal but rather Yasmen asking Josiah to move back home. The proposal that does come later is just extra glaze on the limoncello pound cake, if you will. 

Before I Let Go could be considered a slow burn, because Yasmen and Josiah don't kiss for the first time since divorcing until well past the book's halfway point. The aforementioned sex memories occur throughout, the tension between them is constantly building then receding then building again, but the actual making out and boning might feel delayed to some readers. Thankfully, it didn't feel that way to me. While not a holiday-themed romance novel, I think having this book released in November was spot-on, and me reading it during this time of year helped me enjoy it even more, because much of the progression in Yasmen and Josiah's romantic rekindling is connected to the holiday season (especially Thanksgiving and New Year's Eve). So if you're interested in stories set amongst Black people in Atlanta, divorced couples getting back together, Black entrepreneurs, soul food recipes, mothers and daughters butting heads, grief surrounding children and/or maternal figures, treatments for depression and anxiety, or love stories that are tangentially-related to the holidays, then read this book! 

Favorite quotes:

"I'm ready to reclaim the space that loss and shit luck tried to take from me" (13).

 

"It's so affirming, even that simplest sprinkling of praise. It makes me realize how arid I've been inside, how badly I've needed watering" (113).

 

"There was just something... liberating? Freeing? Right about telling this stranger everything. Nothing changed, but somehow I felt better. I don't completely understand it, but after all the shit of the last few years, feeling better is worth something" (146).

 

"What if the most right moments tonight were the ones we shared alone in that cellar when our lips almost met? When our hearts beat like talking drums through our chests?... Could it be that what I thought were ashes were actually embers, waiting to be rekindled?" (284). 

"Horny and highly favored!" (313).

 

"'Live long enough,' Dr. Musa says softly, 'and you'll lose people, things. We just need to learn how to deal with it in ways that aren't isolating or destructive. You have to decide if being afraid of losing Yasmen again is worth never having her again'" (361).

BOOKS! (The Stone Sky)

I did it y'all! After receiving the box set of N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy from my generous and thoughtful friend Sho last December, I read it all in under a year! It took me from December 2021 to September 2022 to finish The Fifth Season, and a mere three weeks to finish The Obelisk Gate in October. Admittedly, I dragged my feet on finishing The Stone Sky because I didn't want this epic story to end, but I did manage to finish it on Thanksgiving so I could write this review before November's over. As a reader and reviewer reading 1200+ pages of a genre that's outside my wheelhouse, I am very proud. And as a new fan of this trilogy, I am forever changed. [UPDATE 12/4/22: See the end of this review for physical evidence of me being forever changed, as of my 30th birthday yesterday!]

The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin

For all those who have to fight for the respect that everyone else is given without question 

(Epigraph for The Fifth Season)

To those who have no choice but to prepare their children for the battlefield 

(Epigraph for The Obelisk Gate)

To those who've survived: Breathe. That's it. Once more. Good. You're good. Even if you're not, you're alive. That is a victory. 

(Epigraph for The Stone Sky)

When I posted the link to my review of book 2 on Facebook, I wrote, "Earth has a grudge against humanity, there's 'magic' everywhere, and a super-powered mother and daughter are about to be on opposing teams." Little did I know how excruciatingly true that last part would be in book 3. Keeping the preamble short this third and final time around, I'll only mention a few things. Once again, as I've done in my reviews of book 1 and book 2, I'm explaining this novel to y'all as I'm explaining it to myself, since science fiction and fantasy are not my strong suits. As such, this review will be as long and spoilerific as it wants to be. Additionally, just like she did with book 1 and book 2, Jemisin divided The Stone Sky's chapters among three main characters, and this time our narrator Hoa is one of them. Through his chapters, Hoa finally reveals what his pre-stone eater life was like, dispelling the major myths that have been used to manipulate recorded history and justify orogene enslavement for tens of thousands of years.

Hoa. In Hoa's youth, ages before the Stillness was united under the Sanzed empire (the prevailing colonizing race of Essun's time), there was a megacity called Syl Anagist. This ancient city used magic, the silvery essence of life itself, as a power/energy source to sustain its civilization. The continent was previously composed of three nations, one of which Syl Anagist was established in, but Syl Anagist expanded into a city-state that swallowed up those nations and all the various ethnic groups within them. One such ethnic group was the Thniess (Niess, Niespeople) who were known for having pale skin, "icewhite" eyes, "ashblow" hair (ash-colored afros), and being the inventors of the "Plutonic Engine" (what folks called the Obelisk Gate back then). Niess plutonic engines were exquisitely efficient technological feats, yet were also small and presumably made for art or curiosity's sake; certainly not for any world domination or resource extraction purposes. But the Syl Anagistines (the colonizers of Hoa's time) couldn't bear being outdone, so they spread lies about Niess inferiority and non-humanness to the masses, committed a genocide against the Niess, and imprisoned the few remaining Niess to be experimented on. However, those experiments only proved that the Niess were humans just like anyone else. And since colonizers can't stand having their lies—and thus their insecurities and wrongdoings—exposed, the SAs proceeded to create an entire system to uphold and perpetuate their lies. They drilled obelisk pits around the world in which to build gigantic obelisks ("plutonic fragments"), and then spent years charging them up with magic. All of this in hopes to one day lift the obelisks out of the ground, start up the Plutonic Engine, and send the onyx obelisk down to tap Earth's core for its resources, thus securing a never-ending supply of magic (a state they called "geoarcanity"). The SAs also dug a subway system ("Deep Earth route") that went from Syl Anagist, through the center of the Earth, to an oceanside city on the other side of the world called Corepoint, which was built around the pit where the onyx was planted (the largest and most forceful of all 256 obelisks that were made back then).

 

To do the dirty work of preparing and operating the Plutonic Engine, the SAs created people in a lab who were artificially engineered to resemble the Niess and be able to interact with the obelisks. (We later learn that their ability was a combination of both orogeny and magic.) These people, classified as non-humans, were called "tuners". They were the precursor to orogenes, all of them had -wha suffixes to their names, and Hoa (Houwha) was one of them. In the part of Syl Anagist where they lived, Houwha and his siblings were separated from each other and imprisoned within a hexagonal complex (the precursor to the Fulcrum) that was built around the amethyst obelisk. (This is the same amethyst that Essun, as Syenite, used to destroy Meov in her filicide/suicide attempt in book 1.) All the tuners were constantly monitored and told what to do by "conductors", the precursor to Guardians. Fortunately, however, the tuners developed their own language ("earthspeak" or "earthtalk") which allowed them to communicate with each other via vibrations within the earth, without having their conversations detected by the conductors. By the time Houwha led a slave revolt and obliterated Syl Anagist—an event called "Burndown", a precursor to the Rifting that Alabaster used to destroy Yumenes in book 1—there were only six tuners remaining. All the others had been "decommissioned" to "the briar patch". More on that momentarily.

The tuners' dear sibling Tetlewha had just been suddenly and mysteriously decommissioned, and Launch Day was only four weeks away, when a woman named Kelenli introduced herself to all of them. Apparently, she was a prototype to the tuners; her earthspeak was elegant and undeniable, but she wasn't created in a lab and didn't possess any discernible difference from regular humans except for her sessapinae. She also had more knowledge of history and how the outside world worked, was feared less and trusted more by the conductors, and was afforded more leeway and decision-making authority within the complex because of her relationship with head conductor Gallat. As an experiment, Kelenli was raised in the same family as Gallat—with neither learning that Kelenli was different until they were teenagers—and as adults Gallat became both Kelenli's boss and lover. (Although, if we know anything about power dynamics on plantations, and since this complex was a futuristic version of a plantation, then their relationship was likely not consensual on Kelenli's part.) By the time Kelenli met Houwha and his siblings, she was secretly pregnant with Gallat's child and full of unspoken rage at being forced to pretend that she wasn't a person. She saw it as her duty to not only liberate herself and her fellow tuners, but also claim the role of the last Niess lorist, the last truth-teller to make sure accurate history got passed down. So Kelenli gently but firmly radicalized the tuners, preparing them to revolt via earthspeak conversations, a field trip to a museum that housed an original Niess-made Plutonic Engine, and having them spend a night at her home, where she revealed the truth about the Niess and why the tuners were made. Houwha was especially fond of Kelenli and fascinated by her prowess, but he also became the most disillusioned after learning from her, because he'd always taken the most pride in being a "tool". After being shown the next day that "the briar patch" was actually a mass of not-quite-dead Niess and tuner bodies (including Tetlewha's), surrounding the base of the amethyst and having their life force drained to supply more magic to it, Houwha and his siblings were ready to burn Syl Anagist to the ground.

On Launch Day, the conductors took the tuners to a different complex ("Zero Site") surrounding another obelisk that had been planted on the Moon, which would be their vantage point for starting up the Plutonic Engine on Earth. (Because of course, the SAs colonized something as magnificent as the Moon, only to use it as a charging station for their wackadoo plot to suck Earth dry. The audacity! The arrogance! The lack of imagination!) Houwha and his siblings intended to subvert their captors' plans by unleashing the power of the Plutonic Engine on Syl Anagist itself, instead of on Earth's core. But both the tuners and the SAs neglected to consider that Earth itself was sentient ("alive"), and that it had been using the iron shards within the obelisk pits as its army, gathering intel on what the humans were plotting. So when the tuners gathered all the obelisks from around the world and activated the Plutonic Engine, Father Earth—his consciousness contained within the core—intercepted it and wrested away 27 of those obelisks, determined to destroy all life on the surface so that humans would finally leave him alone. Because, just like the SAs had learned after experimenting on the Niess, people are just people, and Earth made no distinction between tuner and non-tuner.

 

To end the battle, Earth sicked iron shards on all the SAs gathered within Zero Site (basically invading their bodies and eating their brains, Gallat's included), and transformed Houwha and his siblings into stone eaters. Although Syl Anagist would be a lost cause regardless, before being transformed the tuners managed to redirect the Plutonic Engine's excess power toward the Moon in order to protect the rest of humanity. (This is what flings the Moon out of Earth's orbit, contrary to what people are led to believe for generations to come. It was the colonizers in power, not the tuners/orogenes of that time, who were overzealously exploiting the Earth. And while the tuners/orogenes were responsible for making the Moon go away, it was to spare humanity, not to make it suffer more.) The tuners were also able to delay the rapid descent of the 27 rogue obelisks, so that those obelisks' inevitable piercing of Earth's core wouldn't happen for another 100 years, giving humans just enough time to prepare for surviving "the Shattering". (This is the cataclysmic event that Earth, newly agitated, used to begin the first Season. So the removal of the Moon and the beginning of the Seasons were more a matter of correlation than causation, and those events did not immediately happen in tandem like people in Essun's time would be led to believe.) As for Houwha and his siblings, these six original stone eaters eventually found ways to create more stone eaters as an eternity of loneliness set in. While most forgot who they were pre-transformation, Houwha held onto as many memories as he could, renaming himself Hoa as a tribute to his former self. He and Kelenli never saw each other again, but Kelenli survived, had multiple children, and became the mother of all modern lorists. (It's also implied that orogeny became hereditary through her offspring, which would make her the mother of all orogenes as well.)

Essun. After passing out from using the Obelisk Gate to secure Castrima's victory against the Rennanis army—making Castrima unlivable and getting her right arm turned to stone in the process—Essun awakens on a stretcher, being carried along as the Castrimans walk northwestward across the continent to the now-vacant Rennanis (their intended new home). Once she can move around on her own, and once she has Hoa take her somewhere private to eat her stone arm so it won't weigh her down, Essun immediately wants to go retrieve her daughter Nassun. But she is still weakened, and she can't use her powers; using either orogeny or magic will accelerate her body's stoning process. Also, as Hoa explains, Nassun is already on the move, accompanied by her two nefarious guardians (and Essun's mortal enemies) Schaffa and Steel/Gray Man. Nassun intends to open the Obelisk Gate just like Essun does, it's just a matter of who can get to Corepoint and open the Gate first. To demonstrate how dangerously powerful her daughter has become without Essun knowing, at Essun's request Hoa transports her to Found Moon to see Jija's bejeweled remains from when Nassun killed him.

 

Horrified and disheartened, but also recognizing that she has a real community now among the Castrimans, Essun decides to stay with them until they arrive safely in Rennanis. During that journey, Essun uses her powers when Castrima is ambushed by a band of commless raiders, and her left breast turns to stone as a result. (She lets Hoa eat that as well.) Also during that journey, I get my wish and Essun and her doctor friend Lerna—who's been in love with her since book 1—finally begin a sexual relationship, and it's not until everyone's settled in Rennanis that Lerna brings Essun's attention to the fact that she hasn't menstruated in a while. In other words, she's pregnant! Having already had parts of herself stoned as a consequence of opening the Gate, she and Lerna both know that the baby wouldn't survive if she goes through with her plans to open the Gate again. And she does briefly consider not doing it, so she can temporarily have a family with Lerna before everyone dies from the unrelenting conditions of this Season. But Essun ultimately stays the course, knowing that saving the world (especially the Castrimans) from a never-ending Season is bigger than her own immediate personal happiness. Plus, she still has to get her daughter back.

 

With only a few days left until the Moon is the closest it will ever be to Earth before floating away again, Essun needs to leave for Corepoint now. Hoa chooses this moment to conveniently reveal that he can transport multiple people through the earth at once, so long as everyone is touching. Essun is initially reluctant to burden her friends by asking them to accompany her, but Hoa basically says, in the gentlest way possible (and I paraphrase), "Let people help you, dammit!" So a handful of folks come to bid Essun farewell the next day (including headwoman Ykka), but only four join her on the trip: Lerna (for obvious reasons), Tonkee (for scientific research purposes), Hjarka (one of Ykka's advisors who became Tonkee's girlfriend in book 2), and Danel. Danel was the general of the Rennanis army who sicked a Guardian on Essun in book 2, then became one of the POWs held by the Castrimans as they traveled to Rennanis, and has since been allowed by Ykka to join Castrima as a labor-contributing member of the comm. However, during the long trek to Rennanis, Danel revealed to Essun that she was actually a lorist in the before times. And as a lorist, Danel now insists on witnessing what Essun will achieve at Corepoint so that she can record it for history's sake, doing her part to change the world through storytelling and the written word. 

Holding each other's hands, Essun's crew begins to travel through the earth. As Hoa takes them past Earth's core, Steel (or one of his allies) tries to unlink Essun from Hoa so that she will be vaporized by the surrounding heat and pressure. The attack on Essun fails, but Lerna is lost in the process. No one realizes this until they've arrived at Corepoint, and there's no time to mourn our favorite neighbor/doctor/lover/friend because the time to stop Nassun (who got there before Essun) and recapture the Moon is running out. Speaking of which, mother and daughter have an abrupt and unhappy reunion. Nassun is too far gone in her jadedness, and Essun is unable to prevent her from climbing atop a giant tower and opening the Obelisk Gate. Essun summons the onyx obelisk to help her open a secondary Gate to counter Nassun's. She draws energy/magic from whatever source she can, including the still-active Rifting in Yumenes, and all the world's remaining Guardians who've been stored, hibernating, underneath Corepoint to wait out this Season. (Essun kills them all in the process of extracting their corestone implants.)

 

Mother and daughter reach a stalemate wherein Essun realizes that Nassun intends to make everyone in the world a stone eater (I'll explain why later), that Corepoint and its surroundings will crumble if she and Nassun continue wielding magic at this scale, and most importantly, that Nassun's left hand has become stone as a result of using her Gate. Not wanting Nassun to be stoned to death like Alabaster was (and like Essun is already in the process of being), Essun stops fighting, disabling her Gate and forfeiting her dream of saving the world so that her only remaining child will live. As more of Essun's body solidifies (including her internal organs), she looks up from the ground to where Nassun still stands atop the tower, meeting Nassun's gaze. Essun simultaneously cries and laughs in pride at how amazingly powerful and beautiful her daughter has become, and then she dies. Hoa later takes her statue somewhere deep beneath the nearby ocean floor, where he reconstitutes her into a stone eater. Eventually Essun emerges as a yellowish-brown stone eater with deep red locs, and Hoa explains that he wants to spend eternity with her because community is the only way that people (including stone people) can move forward. Essun, even in this form, still wants to make the world a better place, and Hoa agrees to help her with that. But first, she needs to know her own life story so that she can maintain a sense of who she was before. 

 

("Oh. My. Goodness. So this whole trilogy is basically Hoa retelling Essun's life back to her so she, as a stone eater, can remember who she is???" That's the message I sent Sho immediately after finishing The Stone Sky, and to answer my own question: Yes indeed, that's exactly what it is! This is actually where the novel ends, but I haven't addressed world-weary Nassun yet, so let's continue.)

Nassun. After Nassun stones her father, Schaffa disposes of his two fellow Guardians and leads all of the Found Moon children away from the Antarctics before the people of Jekity can find out what happened to Jija and retaliate. At some point he sends the other kids off to fend for themselves while continuing to travel with Nassun. Given all the suffering she's witnessed and been through, and with Steel's lingering nihilistic influence, Nassun has a meltdown and concludes that the world cannot be fixed or redeemed. There are too many wrongs to be righted, Father Earth is a bully, and stills refuse to be decent to orogenes, so she will use the Obelisk Gate to obliterate everything. With Steel's directions but without Steel's assistance, Nassun and Schaffa head to the underground remains of Syl Anagist, where Nassun must use her magic to reboot the Deep Earth route that will take them to Corepoint. They travel through the earth in a grasshopper-like "vehimal" (vehicle + animal), and as they pass through the core, Father Earth agitates Schaffa's corestone implant as a form of torture while communicating to Nassun through earthspeak. (Nassun has been shown in book 2 and book 3 to be able to receive messages and visions from the obelisks, but communicating with big-E Evil Earth himself is totally new for her.) She demands that Earth stop torturing Schaffa, to which Earth retorts (allow me to paraphrase again), "Don't blame me! Blame the Syl Anagistine colonizers who weren't satisfied with colonizing other people, and tried to pillage my inner depths for more resources than they ever could've needed, not considering that I feel pain too! The havoc I wreak upon humanity is my due! The souls I collect are my due! These is reparations! I got a right to be mad [cue Solange], and you do too, Nassun! Aren't you tired of people robbing you and not leaving you alone, just because you are who you are and you got something they don't? Tell me I'm wrong!" Schaffa doesn't die, but does enter a catatonic state as the vehimal progresses toward Corepoint.

Once above ground again, Nassun sees that Corepoint is now a city inhabited solely by stone eaters. (This is where, as Alabaster recounted to Essun in book 2, his stone eater named Antimony took him to recover after the battle at Meov.) Nassun drags Schaffa to an apartment that Steel directs her to. Corepoint's stone eaters are standoffish, but a few pop in and out of the apartment to help Nassun get by as she tends to Schaffa. Meanwhile, Nassun finds and reads Alabaster's diary—because, as it turns out, she's staying in his old apartment—learning about his connection to her mother and the occasionally-incoherent discoveries he made about how the obelisks, the obelisk pits, and the Obelisk Gate work. When Nassun realizes that Schaffa is dying and that Steel knew this would happen if Schaffa got too close to Earth's core, she threatens not to end the world like Steel wants her to. But Steel counters that Schaffa can't be healed, and will only suffer constant pain if he continues to live. So then, Nassun considers using the Gate to turn Schaffa into a stone eater instead so he can live without pain and never die, but the massive power of the Gate would make every human being a stone eater in the process. This is when Steel gets buck on her, shouting that eternal life is not a reward but a curse, a cruelty, a prison. That's why he's spent so long searching for someone who can destroy the world with the Gate, and why he's manipulated Nassun to be that someone, because he wants his own agonizing 40,000-year existence of loss, lovelessness, and longing to finally cease. He wants a mercy killing, and if all other life on Earth must perish so he can be relieved, then so be it. Furthermore, he asserts that Schaffa—who's at least 4,000 years old already because Guardians don't die—would only suffer the same anguish as a stone eater that Steel does.

(In case anybody is confused like I occasionally was, dying by statue-ification and being turned into a stone eater are two different processes. Nassun considers making the later happen to all people, while she herself would automatically undergo the former due to operating the Gate. Alabaster and Essun experience both.)

As the Moon rises and Nassun accepts that she can make neither Schaffa nor the world better, she decides it's time to end it all by crashing the Moon into the earth. She goes near the obelisk pit at the center of Corepoint and begins connecting obelisks together in the sky but is distracted by the sight of Schaffa, reanimated by Father Earth, entering a building near her and heading underground. Nassun follows him into what's revealed to be Warrant, the Guardian-only comm that's been referenced in book 1 and book 2, but that no one except Guardians have known the location of. In Warrant, Nassun finds Schaffa in a huge hall where implant surgeries are performed, and where all the hibernating Guardians are stored. Schaffa's implant has just been removed and he's been restored to full consciousness, as a gesture of goodwill from Father Earth. Perhaps, now that Schaffa has been revived, maybe Nassun can ensure he remains alive by not destroying Earth, and going the planet-full-of-stone-eaters route instead? So Nassun changes her plans, and returns above ground just in time to run into her mother for the first time in two years. Nassun turns her back on Essun, she opens the Gate, she and Essun fight as I've already described, and as Essun accepts defeat and dies in statue form, Nassun is transfixed by the sight of her mother smiling at her. (Apparently Essun had never smiled at her own daughter before?) She realizes that even in the end, her mother still believed there was something in the world worth saving, and that something was Nassun. At just that moment, the still-activated onyx communicates Essun's last wishes to Nassun, and Nassun changes her plans again at the very last minute, bringing the Moon back in alignment with Earth since her mother couldn't.

After Nassun has her stone hand amputated, after she stays in Corepoint for several months to grieve her mother with her mother's Castriman friends, and after Schaffa dies (good riddance), Nassun boards the vehimal with Essun's crew to begin their journey back to Rennanis. But not before Hoa appears before her to announce that he, Antimony, and Steel have negotiated a truce with Father Earth. (It's revealed that the three of them used to be siblings; Antimony was a tuner named Gaewha, and Steel was a tuner named Remwha. Of the six original stone eaters, these three are the only ones who still remember their past identities. As a prerequisite to their truce with Earth, Steel has promised Hoa and Antimony that he'll chill out on trying to kill everyone.) The Moon is back, all obelisks have been dissolved or buried (no more Gates will be opened to potentially antagonize Father Earth again), and though certain environmental disasters are inevitable, there will be no more Seasons. Hoa tries to encourage Nassun that there are many paths forward and many ways to change the world for the better, even if she can never use her powers again. Whatever path she (or the world at large) chooses, the key to any lasting, stable, and equitable future will be for people to cooperate with each other. With that conversation over, Nassun and her mom's friends are on their way, and Hoa begins working his magic on Essun's remains.

 

Whew. Okay. Wow, right? I had so many additional notes I wanted to share in this review of The Stone Sky, but it's already gotten pretty long even for me (which is saying A LOT, I know). This is not a dissertation, and I've had to remind myself multiple times while writing about the Broken Earth trilogy that my task is merely to summarize these stories as I understand them and try to make interesting points, draw interesting connections, or ask interesting questions based on my understanding. No need to write the books all over again. 

 

So out of all the extra notes I had, I'm most strongly left contemplating all the things Essun, our hero, doesn't get. She doesn't get to tell Lerna she loves him. She doesn't get to have a happy home life with Lerna, their new baby, and Nassun once everything has been resolved (a potential fourth family for Essun, after having lost the one she grew up in, the one she had with Alabaster and Innon, and the one she had with Jija). She doesn't get to repair her relationship with her daughter, or even see Nassun through the rest of her childhood and approaching adolescence. She doesn't get to avenge her son Uche's death because Nassun kills Jija before she can get to him. If we're being real, she doesn't even get the triumph of achieving the enormous moon-wrangling mission that Alabaster bequeathed to her (even though it's her influence that ultimately prompts Nassun to do it for her). Essun is a reluctant hero to begin with. And even after accepting her role and stepping up to the gargantuan task placed before her, she's a hero who, technically, fails. Depending on if Danel and/or Nassun is successful in championing Essun's legacy to the masses, Essun might not go down in history as the 44-year-old, Black, dreadlocked, widowed, disabled, pregnant mother who escaped slavery and used her superpowers—powers for which she was subjugated and discriminated against—to spare humanity from extinction.

 

Nevertheless, there are important things that Essun does get. She gets to use her dying moments to show Nassun how much she loves her and is proud of her, something she neglected to express as a parent because she was focused on making sure Nassun had the tools to survive. Finally expressing her feelings toward her daughter in a way that her daughter could understand and receive, is what makes the difference. Furthemore, after her rebirth as a stone eater, Essun gets to spend eternity fighting for justice and improving the world, a desire that's been brewing in her all along (but especially since the time when she, as Syenite, first became a mother). And also, with Hoa literally taking her hand and encouraging her to never be patient or complacent, she gets to never be alone or fight alone again. And also, who knows whether she won't still be guiding and looking after her daughter as Nassun's new stone eater companion, even if Nassun can't use her powers anymore?

In completing this trilogy, I'm reminded of the unexpected yet profound emotional and spiritual experience I had while reading Bernice L. McFadden's Nowhere Is a Place over the summer. And just like with Nowhere Is a Place, I feel like I've been brought to this body of N.K. Jemisin's work at the precisely right time. As a Black woman choosing to read the Broken Earth trilogy as an allegory for Black people finding a way, for themselves and for future generations, to survive and mend a world that hates us, I find myself similarly touched and similarly encouraged not to yield to despair. So if the lesson I learned from The Fifth Season was to imagine the possibilities beyond a status quo that isn't as natural or immutable as it seems, and if the lesson I learned from The Obelisk Gate was to trust people and believe in community for my own sake, then the lesson I've learned from The Stone Sky, as hokey and trite as it might sound, is this: I am not alone, none of us are, and it's okay (imperative) for us to want and demand the impossible.

For Essun. The pomegranate is a separate thing.

As soon as I read the last page of book 3, I wrote in the margins, "BRILLIANT. GORGEOUS. NKJ is a prophet! What a gift she's give us with this trilogy!" I feel like I've exhausted all my words at this point, and I'm getting teary again thinking about what a treasure this series has been to me. So in closing, I'll leave you all with the message I sent my friend Marlee once I completed this journey on Thanksgiving (directly after messaging Sho): "And now I'm sitting in my room at my grandpa's house crying because I just finished book 3 and I feel overwhelmingly grateful to have read the Broken Earth trilogy, especially at this time in my life. It's hard to explain, but you can tell NKJ gave so much of herself to write this story that emphasizes hope (amidst hopelessness), and community, and not being a colonizing a-hole, and letting Black people be, etc. in a way that just goes... beyond, haha. And moms! There's a lot of stuff about moms in there too. Oh and not exploiting/depleting the planet! That's another big part of it too." Read this trilogy and maybe change your life!

 

Favorite quotes: 

"They're afraid because we exist, she says. There's nothing we did to provoke their fear, other than exist. There's nothing we can do to earn their approval, except stop existing—so we can either die like they want, or laugh at their cowardice and go on with our lives" (109).

 

"But there are none so frightened, or so strange in their fear, as conquerors. They conjure phantoms endlessly, terrified that their victims will someday do back what was done to them—even if, in truth, their victims couldn't care less about such pettiness and have moved on. Conquerors live in dread of the day when they are shown to be, not superior, but simply lucky" (210).

 

"I want to understand what she means us to learn... I also want to simply look at her face and bask in that deep, powerful orogenic presence of hers. It's nonsensical... I want her to look at me. I want to speak to her. I want to be her.

 

I decide that what I'm feeling is love.

 

...I think of what life I might want for myself, if I could have a choice... I think of living with Kelenli. Sitting at her feet every night, speaking with her as much as I want, in every language that I know, without fear. I think of her smiling without bitterness and this thought gives me incredible pleasure." (205, 261).

"Impossible to delude oneself in a moment like this. Impossible to see only what one wants to see, when the power to change the world ricochets through mind and soul and the spaces between the cells... Impossible not to understand that Nassun has known Schaffa for barely more than a year, and does not truly know him, given how much of himself he has lost. Impossible not to realize that she clings to him because she has nothing else—

But through her determination, there is a glimmer of doubt in her mind... Barely even a thought. But it whispers, Do you really have nothing else?

Is there not one person in this world besides Schaffa who cares about you?" (381-82).

"'The Fulcrums are wrong... Imprisonment of orogenes was never the only option for ensuring the safety of society.' I pause deliberately, and she blinks, perhaps remembering that orogene parents are perfectly capable of raising orogene children without disaster. 'Lynching was never the only option. The nodes were never the only option. All of these were choices. Different choices have always been possible.'

There is such sorrow in her, your little girl. I hope Nassun learns someday that she is not alone in the world. I hope she learns how to hope again" (395-96).