I thought the first two books were wonderful and deserved all the accolades. I think she really, really botched the landing, but what was botched and how it was done is subtle, and it would be easy to read the third book and not see the problem, so I’m not going to haze you, OP, for liking a book with such a huge flaw. Lots of people did and do.
Here’s what I mean. SF usually works by what we call “estrangement”, which is really just allegory. Jemisin’s Stillness is both a world unto itself, and an allegory for our own world, just like so many other SF novels. In the case of this trilogy, the allegory is about slavery/racism: this is pretty easy to see, for the most part. The powers that be chain up another group of people, all for the powers’ benefit. Just look at all the language in the first two books that dehumanizes orogenes and turns them into threats and outcastes.
Now, the tragedy of slavery is that black Africans are just like everyone else: ordinary people. But a whole intellectual superstructure gets invented to dehumanize them: think conservative political cartoonists drawing Michelle Obama as having gorilla arms.
In Jemisin’s first two books, it seems clear that anyone can be unfortunate enough to be born an orogene. It might run in families, but it’s not a racially-linked characteristic: Jemisin meticulously describes the racial characteristics of pretty much everyone in the first two books, and they’re all over the map.
But in the third book, she starts to make the point that the orogenes are a particular subrace of humans: this race IS special/different. It ruins the allegory, which only works if anyone could be an orogene, and turns the final novel into a polemic.
I mean, the world is cool-ass as hell and she’s a really good prose writer, but I got halfway through the third one and was like OMG really? and had to put it down for a long time before I could go back and finish it, and the whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth.
“The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” by Ken Kesey. I was about 15, in 1983 or so. I’d been raised by old-school Republicans who thought Ronald Reagan was the second coming; I’d absorbed all that “say no to drugs” rhetoric and was like why would anyone in their right mind DO drugs, because they’re so clearly dangerous.
And then I got hold of TEKAT somehow, and devoured it, and was like oh I get it drugs are FUN and can change your perception of the world. I didn’t run out and do drugs or anything—I was 18 before I drank or smoked weed—but what it clued me into was the sheer prevalence of propaganda, disinformation and just straight-up bullying in conservative rhetoric, all designed to keep people in line and unquestioningly obedient.