I read The Fifth Season under special circumstances: waiting in a hospital emergency room, and enthralled by a fantasy novel about deeply felt characters facing much worse problems than I was. (I'm fine now.) The Obelisk Gate is just as good: intense and at times brutal fantasy with immediate connections to the politics, racial and otherwise, of our world, without being in any way limited by this. I didn't find the multiple viewpoints quite as clear in this volume but I still loved it.