66 pages • 2 hours read
N. K. JemisinA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
The novel's protagonist, Damaya, Syenite, and Essun are all the same woman: a “mongrel Midlatter” who is tall and “well-fleshed” in the Sanzed manner, but whose “hair hangs round her face in ropy fused locks,” and whose “skin is unpleasantly ocher-brown by some standards and unpleasantly olive-pale by others” (10). More importantly, she is an orogene. Her powers first manifest when she is “Damaya”—a girl of nine or 10 who nearly freezes a boy bullying her at school.
Damaya is a shy and somewhat anxious child, and multiple external factors—her parents’ rejection of her, the alternately kind and abusive treatment she receives from her Guardian Schaffa, her outsider status at the Fulcrum—exacerbate these tendencies. Nevertheless, Damaya is talented, perceptive, and curious, progressing quickly in her classes and spending much of her free time exploring the complex. She passes her first ring test a year before her peers, taking the name “Syenite.”
By N. K. Jemisin
How Long 'Til Black Future Month?
How Long 'Til Black Future Month?
N. K. Jemisin
The City We Became
The City We Became
N. K. Jemisin
The Obelisk Gate
The Obelisk Gate
N. K. Jemisin
The Stone Sky
The Stone Sky
N. K. Jemisin
The World We Make
The World We Make
N. K. Jemisin