Schaffa seems like a benevolent teacher and father figure-until he deliberately breaks Damaya’s hand! Schaffa and Damaya travel from her home to the Fulcrum, a school where orogenes receive strict training.
He is a Guardian, part of a social class charged with controlling and training orogenes. In the first book, T he Fifth Season, a gifted young orogene girl named Damaya is abandoned by her parents to the care of a man named Schaffa. Orogenes are often abused, abandoned, or murdered by non-orogene relatives, who fear their powers. The oppression of the orogenes has many possible parallels to real-world colonialism and racism and produces complex relationships with huge power imbalances. In a post-apocalyptic world with an unstable climate, people called orogenes can harness energy to control volcanoes and earthquakes. It’s a cohesive, diverse, fully developed world, with its own races, geography, mythology, and much more.
Jemisin’s Hugo- and Nebula-winning Broken Earth series is one of my favorite works of fantasy. (Note: this essay contains spoilers for the Broken Earth trilogy and details of physical, medical, and emotional abuse of children in fiction.)
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