skybridge

babewiththepower.bsky.social · @babewiththepower.bsky.social@bridge.neodb.net

Rated The Stone Sky 8/10

This is how the trilogy ends for the last time. It's difficult to write a review for just his book and not for the trilogy as a whole, so I don't think I'm going to try. Of the book itself, I have to say I would've really, really liked a lot more of how the world was before it all went to hell and more detail or time given to the actual breaking of the world itself, time that was spent instead on what I found less interesting of crossing a desert or just hanging out at Corepoint. The loss of one character was rather abrupt, actually two of them, more so than you would think consider how important they were written to be to the main characters. The end was as expected, but not with the "winner" (you could say) I'd expected. I don't know how interesting it would be considering they're made of stone and move with the speed of stone, but I'd like some filling in on how Houwha lived to become Hoa. I don't think I got a good grasp on how he cared so much about Essun, so maybe that would help fill out his character for me. And the idea of a rather hopeless winner is rather sad. Was she really the winner? Or the character with whom the book closes?<br/><br/>I think with the trilogy as a whole you can have so many deep conversations over what it says about humanity: war, repression, parenting, narcisism, sexism, environmentalism, so many -isms. You see all of those and how so much of it literally breaks the world into pieces and everyone suffers for it, time and again, and seemingly no one seems to ever learn, even with much of it written in stone. History repeating itself over and over. I love what Hoa has to say near the end of this book in summarizing many things that have happened since the Earth broke, "All of these were choices. Different choices have always been possible... Orogeny was never the only way to change the world." Indeed, as Hoa also says, rather than tribalism and force "cooperation presents opportunities," but it's a question of whether we're willing to let go of "us vs them" and take them.

#book

Published 2026-08-18 17:59 UTC · bridged from Atmosphere