The Fifth Season

The Fifth Season

by

N. K. Jemisin

Teachers and parents! Our Teacher Edition on The Fifth Season makes teaching easy.
The narrator of The Fifth Season, Hoa is a stone eater who somehow makes himself look and move like a human child—though a very strange one, with extremely pale skin, hair, and eyes. He is especially fixated on Essun, and seems to transform himself so that he might travel with her and because he wants her to “like him.” As The Fifth Season begins, Hoa emerges from inside a geode as a small figure who slowly begins to move and walk, and then breaks off other white and red crystals from the geode itself and begins eating them. He gathers the rest into a bundle and carries throughout the novel as his sustenance—though they are not just food for him, as he claims but does not explain, but also part of his identity and how he is able to take on a human appearance. Hoa seems to genuinely care for Essun, as he protects her from a kirkhusa by turning it into stone and also defends her from other stone eaters at Castrima, but like the rest of kind his origins and true motivations are left entirely mysterious in The Fifth Season. At the same time, Essun cannot help seeing Hoa as a kind and curious child, even though she knows that he is a potentially dangerous being who is probably thousands of years old. At the novel’s end, Hoa reveals himself as the story’s narrator, referring to Essun in the second-person and describing how he, like many other stone eaters, was first drawn to her when she drew power from the obelisk at Meov.

Hoa Quotes in The Fifth Season

The The Fifth Season quotes below are all either spoken by Hoa or refer to Hoa. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Hierarchy, Oppression, and Prejudice Theme Icon
).
Chapter 7 Quotes

He’s not just small but stocky, as if his people are built for a different kind of sturdiness than the ideal that Old Sanze has spent millennia cultivating. Maybe his race are all this white, then, whoever they are.

But none of this makes sense. Every race in the world these days is part Sanzed. They did rule the Stillness for centuries, after all, and they continue to do so in many ways. And they weren’t always peaceful about it, so even the most insular races bear the Sanzed stamp whether their ancestors wanted the admixture or not. Everyone is measured by their standard deviations from the Sanzed mean.

Related Characters: Essun/Damaya/Syenite, Hoa
Page Number: 111
Explanation and Analysis:
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The Fifth Season PDF

Hoa Quotes in The Fifth Season

The The Fifth Season quotes below are all either spoken by Hoa or refer to Hoa. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Hierarchy, Oppression, and Prejudice Theme Icon
).
Chapter 7 Quotes

He’s not just small but stocky, as if his people are built for a different kind of sturdiness than the ideal that Old Sanze has spent millennia cultivating. Maybe his race are all this white, then, whoever they are.

But none of this makes sense. Every race in the world these days is part Sanzed. They did rule the Stillness for centuries, after all, and they continue to do so in many ways. And they weren’t always peaceful about it, so even the most insular races bear the Sanzed stamp whether their ancestors wanted the admixture or not. Everyone is measured by their standard deviations from the Sanzed mean.

Related Characters: Essun/Damaya/Syenite, Hoa
Page Number: 111
Explanation and Analysis: