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"Five New Yorkers must come together in order to save their city from destruction in the first book of a stunning new series by Hugo award-winning and NYT bestselling author N. K. Jemisin. Every great city has a soul. Some are ancient as myths, and others are as new and destructive as children. New York? She's got six. When a young man crosses the bridge into New York City, something changes. He doesn't remember who he is, where he's from, or even his own name. But he can feel the pulse of the city, can see its history, can access its magic. And he's not the only one. All across the boroughs, strange things are happening. Something is threatening to destroy the city and her six newborn avatars unless they can come together and stop it once and for all"--… (more)
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The City We Became is an ambitious, fast-paced book. By the concept, this is urban fantasy, but this is goes beyond those set genre tropes, with multiple points of view and a particular, gritty,
I greatly enjoyed the voices and the mood of the book. Though I have never been to NYC, and find large cities to be horrific, panic attack-inducing things, the characters and their connections to the city were embodied by a wonderful rightness. What I did find frustrating was a complete lack of agency in much of the cast. The people 'awaken' and just know things and do things. They aren't really people anymore but demigods, and as horror-tinged as the book is, everything felt too easy. That dampened suspense in a major way.
Even so, I enjoyed the book overall, though I'm not sure if I will read onward in the series.
The narrative is grating, particularly the beginning and the end which is told in first person. I am not a big fan of narrators that are very obvious, and only a few authors can make that palatable (Robin McKinley, Joyce Carol Oates), N. K. Jemesin isn't one of them.
I had a number of problems with the book. It drags. As a friend of mine also pointed out, the reader understands what its going on by the end of the prologue, but it takes the characters over four hundred pages to figure it out for themselves, and to undertake the pretty mundane task of finding one another. And while the orogenes in The Broken Earth were potent metaphors for various aspects of chattel slavery, I felt like The City We Became didn't really engage with the potential complexities of its premise. The city avatars are basically all good, and the city is coming to life is a good thing, and they are a charming team of ethnically diverse heroes; the bad guys are all evil racists. But surely cities—and here my thoughts are influenced by James Scott's Seeing Like a State—are born of the push and pull between complexity and simplification. Cities are diverse places, but they are also always trying to contain and stamp out and systematize their own diversity in order to make it legible and therefore controllable. Without this, I would argue, you have no city. A city planner wants things in neat grids, and is willing to smash those who gets in their way; an American city in particular, is born of stolen land. I feel like some of this is touched on vaguely, but not really dealt with. I feel like there's another version of this book that's about cities coming to life in all their mess just being a thing that is, rather than a thing that's good, and I think that book is probably more interesting than this one.
This is made worse by the fact that the social commentary in The City We Became ranges from the obvious to the banal. It felt to me like it was written by Twitter: the villain is clearly a Karen, and there are definite echoes of the Chris Cooper birdwatching incident (though that actually happened after the book was written). Jemisin's book doesn't have anything new or interesting to say about those topics; it's pretty much all the exact same way you would get people snarkily commenting on it online. There's a particularly risible subplot about evil bro fascist racist progressive artists which completely failed to convince me that its villains were real people; again, it felt like an online stereotype of a category of person I'm not completely convinced actually exists. On top of that, this subplot is resolved stupidly easy; basically someone tweets "help out our art gallery," and it's all taken care of in a couple paragraphs.
Anyway, overall I found this pretty disappointing considering the strength of Jemisin's other work, and I imagine I will only read future installments if "forced" to do so by them being Hugo finalists in future years.
New York City has reached a stage in its development when it comes to life, and each borough becomes embodied in a human who represents that borough's personality and history. However, the embodiments of other cities in other multiverses don't want New York to come alive, and seek to
That description makes the book sound utterly ludicrous... and in some ways, it is, but Jemison is a brilliant world-builder and makes it all feel very real and very sensible, while at the same time not shying from the sheer fun of the concept.
This book is a wonderful homage to New York City that perfectly captures the essence of the boroughs and the city as a whole.
I listened to the audiobook, and it deserves every award that exists for audiobooks. The narrator is brilliant - she captures a range of different New York accents, and she is frightfully good at maniacal laughter. It's a virtuoso performance, with some masterful audio effects added in.
I can't wait for more books in the series!
N.K. Jemisin is one of my go-to authors who writes phenomenal, complex fantasy with amazing world building. This book lives up to my expectations while being completely different from everything I've read by her. It's a love letter to New York while being aware of its flaws. It's raw, with a lot of swearing (in a fitting way, this is New York after all), and also a very diverse cast that has to fight racism and other societal evils just as much as the infiltrating white thing. It's a nod to Lovecraft while subverting it, too. When is the next book in the trilogy out again? I'm going to be preordering it.
Quote: “People who say change is impossible are usually pretty happy with things just as they are.”
I do want to read the next in the series, but I hope that in book 2 she's more content to let the storytelling work.
So this isn't my genre, but there were a few things I liked about this novel, primarily how it addressed racism and how one of the characters, who seemed to have been pulled from a Joyce Carol Oates novel, in a way that wasn't particularly comfortable to read about. I don't know if I'll read the next book in this series, but I will certainly be interested enough to read reviews about it.
First, the book was well written. My first impression
The story itself is good - characters were interesting, each person added to the story. However, I found the ending a bit strange, between New Jersey being an honorary Borough, and while I understand why Staten Island was written the way she was, and it fits within the rest of the story, I had a very hard time with this character.
The creation of beings (Avatars? Guardians?) for several boroughs of New York City was a brilliant, outside-the-box concept. It was a little disappointing that the representative of New York City, itself, doesn’t seem to return in the end. I had been hooked by the opening preamble: queer black kid meeting up with cigarette-smoking Paulo. (This homeless young man succumbed to a supernatural coma when the city was invaded by forces set to destroy the City). But the chaos and the power of the adventurous “boroughs” and what they get up to in keeping their city from dying is quite rollicking.
The best quote to describe what Jemisin’s theme was about is in regards to the Manhattan character: Manny’s been in New York for less than an hour and yet he knows, he knows, that cities are organic, dynamic systems. Which of course, they really are. Look at how “a city” modifies the inhabitants’ behaviour, the living environment, the very air we breathe in a city and then tell me that isn’t true. Dazzling affirmation of the author’s story, yes?
One major quibble were distracting side-plays in the lives of supporting characters and whirlwind sequences of social justice statements (situations underscoring racism and bigotry). These human-conditions are heart-breaking, yes; but were also testimonials which derailed the thrust of the narrative. Their prominent place in this novel didn’t mesh, even as a theme with the concept of a dying city. Despite that critique, it is an untrammelled urban fantasy that folks who love the idea of a living city as a character will want to discover for themselves.
This one couldn’t be more different. It’s set in contemporary (although pre-Covid19) New York City.
Cities are born. Some evolve and reach their full potential. Others sadly die and slip away, most often due to
Each city has an Avatar – a more-than-human that embodies the city itself.
New York City’s Avatar has vanished. To solve the mystery of his disappearance and save him and all of NYC, each of the five Burroughs have newly created avatars. These avatars are formerly humans living their average lives, but each one most represents the spirit of the individual boroughs. They slowly find each other, and with the help of the avatars of Sao Paulo and Hong Kong, they must come together to defeat the enemy and find the comatose New York City.
Hugely intriguing, even though I’ve never been to New York, so I don’t know the individual boroughs’y characteristics and spirits.
I found it wonderfully imaginative. As this is the first in a trilogy, there are many hanging threads.
I believe I’ll wait until the trilogy is complete to go with this series. In the meantime, I’ll certainly be exploring more of Jemisin’s works.
After the creative burst where Jemisin created these characters she moved on to making a POINT. I have no problem with that at all, many of my favorite books are books that make points, but this is fiction, and we need to remember that we are telling a story about many things, and that within that story we can advance all sorts of great and wise philosophy and social commentary but what we can't do (and end up with a great book) is to bring the story to a Road Runner type skidding halt, hammer home that commentary, and then return to our regularly scheduled programing. Jemisin does this a LOT. And when she is making point, her storytelling and characterization really suffer. Nowhere was this more evident than in the plotline with the white supremacist art collective and the evil Arts Center Board. I really hated that. The writing was hamfisted and the point was silly and both the concepts of the power of art and the danger of leaving art beholden to capitalists and the Bronx deserved better. There were other parts of the book that also did not work for me, but that was a real nadir and it came so close on the heels of some really wonderful storytelling that it felt like I got whiplash.
This is still a fun read, anyone who loves the City will enjoy it I think, but it did not live up to the promise of the beginning. Also, as a resident of Queens, I have to say we definitely got short shrift -- I liked who they chose to represent the borough, but she did very little in the story. At least we didn't get the Staten Island characterization. Jemisin really hates Staten Island! I have no strong feelings about it (view spoiler) but it did give us the Wu Tang Clan, and I once went to a friend's parents' house there for Feast of the Seven Fishes, and they had a 6-foot round working fountain embedded in concrete in the living room, It was astonishing! Also the food was great. (I think that is the only time I have been to SI other than to drive through, or turn around at the ferry terminal since its fun to ride the ferry in circles on a hot day.)
ETA: I read this one and also listened to the audio -- frequently when i do this I end up reading much more than listening, but Robin Miles' narration was really fantastic and added a lot to the experience -- I absolutely recommend the audiobook for people who like to listen.
Story (5/5): The concept of this story is a really good one, stories have been written about cities being living entities before but never quite like this story. The concept is
I liked this a lot and really enjoyed the concept. I think the constant jumping around did distract from getting to know the characters some and parts of this book felt long. However, I really enjoyed the ideas and overall story presented here, it gives a lot of food for thought.
Characters (5/5): As mentioned above this isn’t really a character driven story but more of a concept and idea driven story. We jump between the different characters so much that it’s hard to engage with them as characters, they end up being more ideas or personifications of the parts of the city they represent. All of the characters are intriguing and well done. The fact that well established cities are a person/character/soul is an amazing concept and very creative.
Setting (5/5): I am going to be honest and say I am not a New York City fan, I’ve been there a few times and I think it’s loud and dirty (I am not a big city fan in general). However, I can see the charm of city living for some. What I really appreciated in this book is how well it explained the boroughs and personalities of parts of New York City so well to an outsider like myself. I learned a lot about New York City, enjoyed the setting and appreciated all the effort that went into making this a believable setting. I think those who love New York City will enjoy how it is represented both, the downsides and upsides of New York City are well represented.
Writing Style (5/5): This wasn't the quickest or easiest book to read, Jemisin's books never are. It was a very good story though and had some amazing world-building, so I appreciate the quality of story-telling here. In general I have found while Jemisin’s books do take effort and concentration to read, they are generally worth it because of the creativity used to put together the story and because of how thought-provoking they are. That is definitely the case for this book. I find myself thinking about it a lot and really looking forward to reading future books in this series.
My Summary (5/5): Overall I ended up loving this even though it took a bit of effort for me to get through. The payoff was definitely worth the time put in to read this. The concept and world-building are amazing here. This is an excellent “idea” book with some fantastical elements involving personification of a city and parallel realities. At times there is a very Lovecraftian feel to the story as well. I ended up really enjoying it a ton and am really looking forward to the next book in the series.
As for what might be the most controversial aspect of the novel, the character of Aislyn, who becomes the avatar of Staten Island, seems to evoke pity and some readers resent her "heel" turn in the plot. Many is the person who, in the name of legitimate grievances, made the exact wrong decision. How that decision plays out has to be the driving force in at least the forthcoming book in the trilogy.