Describing a book as "an instant classic" is usually the sort of thing reserved for breathless dust jacket marketing. But the first book of the Broken Earth trilogy really deserves it. N.K. Jemisin creates a complex multi-generational character (as it were) that you care about right from the start and who you can root for as she grapples with the end of the world. The cataclysmic backdrop provides many page turning twists and maintains the pace of action despite allowing Jemisin to convincingly fleshing out an entire fantasy world. You really can't ask much more than this from the genre -- a good story about people who are not quite us, in a setting that is not quite ours. Our own world always comes into better focus when someone is able to double it like this. So yeah, join the bestseller bandwagon and go read it.
On a side note -- I'm hard pressed to think of other sci-fi that takes gelology as its central science, even though I always feel like geology is already sci-fi all by itself; I mean, if the idea of Ohio being tropical isn't science fiction, then what is?
#reread
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