★★★★ (of 5)

• Full Title: The City We Became
• Author: N.K. Jemisin
• Year: 2020
• Pages: 434
• Genre: Fantasy
• Publisher: Orbit (Hachette)
• ISBN: 978-0-316-50984-8
• Wikipedia page
• Author’s Wikipedia page

 

Summary

The foundational idea of this fantasy story is that any city on Earth — when it becomes big enough, important enough, strong enough — will become sentient and take up existing humans as avatars. In the past it already happened to Cairo, Paris, Hong Kong, and others (including a few that were “still-born”, like New Orleans and Port-au-Prince), and now it’s happening to New York City. But it’s different this time.

Told from the perspectives of the various humans who suddenly become the avatars for the city’s five burroughs — Manny, Brooklyn, Bronca, Padmini, and Aislyn — the story arc lasts only a few days. As with previous city births, multidimensional evil lurks and attempts to destroy the city during the birthing process. The five avatars work to find each other and survive.

It’s the first novel in an (as-of-yet) unfinished trilogy, taking up where a previous short story left off. That story, The City We Became (2016, see my review; read it here) forms the prologue to this novel, with only a few words changed near the end.

 

Praise

Jemisin’s prose is sharp and clear; when the reader doesn’t know what’s going on, it’s because the characters don’t yet know either. The descriptions of New York City rang true (at least to me, someone who’s only visited a few times). Perhaps the most striking part was how she distilled the “soul” of each burrough into a handful of recognizable but sometimes realistically contradictory characteristics that just happened to fit each human — the avatars.

In the midst of fighting off the truly metaphysical evil (which is, I think, based loosely on the Cthulhu mythos), the avatars are also fighting off the more mundane daily evils of this actual Earth — including racism, sexism, homophobia, the endless creep of soulless mediocre corporations and chain stores, dark money, poverty, and addiction. Jemisin doesn’t shy away from mentioning these, efficiently and expertly tackling each in its turn.

She also does really well in building tension, then bringing it back down, building it again slightly more intensely, and then coming down... Until the climax. For me, the rhythm of this book was far more enjoyable and palatable than the often confusing paths of The Fifth Season (for which she won a Hugo, and is the only other full-length Jemisin novel I’ve read).

And IT ENDED. Near the end, I began to dread that the book wasn’t going to end, as with so many trilogy openers these days which are really just the first act of the larger series. But that dread was misplaced. Jemisin had an entire plot laid out for this book, and brought it to a swift and satisfying conclusion. (While leaving open a pathway for an obvious sequel.) So much yes.

Several bits are likely quotable; one sentence that stood out enough for me to copy it was this one:

“People who say change is impossible are usually pretty happy with things just as they are.”

—page 233

 

Criticism

The present tense still bugs me (I will probably never get entirely used to it), but it was better here than in other books — perhaps due to the urgency and now feeling of the story. The shifting of perspective sometimes got confusing, especially when some of the five burrough avatars were in the same scenes. When three or four women were present, the pronoun “she” wasn’t always obvious who it was pointing to.

 

Conclusion

Not being a New Yorker, I kept my tablet handy with Google Maps open, so I could follow the main characters’ paths across the massive city. I used search engines to look up dozens of words and phrases as I read, like mille-feuille, Inwood, Inwood Hill Park, the Lenape people, Guastavino tile, City Hall Station, and Shorakkopoch Rock — and those were just from the Manhattan parts of the story. So, even if the story hadn’t been enjoyable, it would have been educational.

But the story was enjoyable, the characters were mostly relatable (to the extent that a fully human reader can relate to a city-representing avatar), the tension was palpable, the overt slapdowns aimed at H.P. Lovecraft were satisfying, and the seemingly prophetic vision of an NYC gripped with protests and a virus-like invasion (the book was released in March 2020, just as the Covid-19 pandemic got underway in the U.S. and a couple of months before nationwide protests locked up major cities) were timely. I certainly look forward to the next installments in this series.

 

 

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