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Summary
Summary
Three-time Hugo Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author N.K. Jemisin crafts her most incredible novel yet, a "glorious" story of culture, identity, magic, and myths in contemporary New York City.
In Manhattan, a young grad student gets off the train and realizes he doesn't remember who he is, where he's from, or even his own name. But he can sense the beating heart of the city, see its history, and feel its power.
In the Bronx, a Lenape gallery director discovers strange graffiti scattered throughout the city, so beautiful and powerful it's as if the paint is literally calling to her.
In Brooklyn, a politician and mother finds she can hear the songs of her city, pulsing to the beat of her Louboutin heels.
And they're not the only ones.
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.
For more from N. K. Jemisin, check out:
The Inheritance Trilogy
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
The Broken Kingdoms
The Kingdom of Gods
The Inheritance Trilogy (omnibus edition)
Shades in Shadow: An Inheritance Triptych (e-only short fiction)
The Awakened Kingdom (e-only novella)
Dreamblood Duology
The Killing Moon
The Shadowed Sun
The Dreamblood Duology (omnibus)
The Broken Earth
The Fifth Season
The Obelisk Gate
The Stone Sky
How Long 'til Black Future Month? (short story collection)
"A glorious fantasy." --Neil Gaiman
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The staggering contemporary fantasy that launches three-time Hugo Award-winner Jemisin's new trilogy (following the Broken Earth series) leads readers into the beating heart of New York City for a stunning tale of a world out of balance. After hundreds of years of gestation, New York City is awakening to sentience, but "postpartum complications" threaten to destroy it. An alien, amorphous force, personified by the Woman in White, launches an attack on New York. Five people--one for each of the city's five boroughs--are called to become avatars dedicated to protecting the city. If they can combine their powers, they'll be able to awaken the avatar of the city as a whole and defeat the Woman in White, but first they'll have to find each other. While the Woman in White works to undermine them, the five avatars, whose personalities delightfully mirror the character of their respective boroughs (the Bronx is "creative with an attitude," Manhattan is "smart, charming, well-dressed, and cold enough to strangle you in an alley if we still had alleys"), learn the extent of their new powers. Jemisin's earthy, vibrant New York is mirrored in her dynamic, multicultural cast. Blending the concept of the multiverse with New York City arcana, this novel works as both a wry adventure and an incisive look at a changing city. Readers will be thrilled. Agent: Lucienne Diver, the Knight Agency. (Mar.)
Guardian Review
NK Jemisin is now such a major figure in science fiction and fantasy, it's remarkable to think that her first novel was published only 10 years ago. Her ascendency has been as rapid as it has been deserved. All three titles in her Broken Earth trilogy - 2015's The Fifth Season, 2016's The Obelisk Gate and 2017's The Stone Sky - won the Hugo award for best novel, an unprecedented achievement. Today she is certainly the most important fantasy writer of her generation; all of which means that major excitement surrounds The City We Became, her first novel since Broken Earth. The problem is that buzz can build unrealistic expectations and lead thereby to anticlimax. Broken Earth is a work of extraordinary scope and grandeur, written with apocalyptic energy and verve, a story that moves mountains. In interviews Jemisin has described her new book as "my chance to have a little monstrous fun after the weight of the Broken Earth saga", which is perhaps by way of dialling down expectations. And there is certainly fun to be had in The City We Became, though I suspect that native New Yorkers will have more fun than out-of-towners. In other words, this is an intensely site-specific piece of fiction. It develops the premise of Jemisin's 2016 story "The City Born Great" (which is included as the novel's prologue). This is that all the world's great cities, when they reach a certain size, are magically "born" into anthropomorphic form, individuals who live in, and guard, their metropolis. Such figures are at once the "soul" of the city and regular human people, somewhat bewildered to discover their calling. It's an idea as old as Athena, although Jemisin's treatment is rather less loftily divine than Greek myth. Her focus is the scuzzy immediacy of street-level city living. New York manifests as five separate figures: Manhattan becomes Manny, a likable young chancer, and other individuals emerge to embody Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Staten Island. It's lucky they do, since the city is under supernatural attack and in need of defenders. There is something of Neil Gaiman in this idea - think of the Angel Islington from his 1996 novel Neverwhere, an actual angel living below London - although Jemisin's imagination is less disposably whimsical than Gaiman's, and her story inhabits a more horrific vibe. The threat to New York appears as a series of ghastly Lovecraftian apparitions. One of the city's cops metamorphoses into an eight-legged, myriad-eyed abomination and comes scrambling after Manny. Hideous tendrils squeeze up from between paving slabs. Tentacular unspeakablenesses lurk in the East River, huge enough to smash up bridges. Chapters open with sentences such as "Something is very wrong at Inwood Hill Park", and "He can sense the prickle of the Enemy's work nearby". But our five heroes, under the mentorship of the avatar of the Brazilian city São Paulo, are up to the challenge. Jemisin is good on the interactions of her group - never too cosy; sparky, inclusive and likable - and her narrative is punctuated with enough incident to keep the reader reading. The treatment is a little uneven. There's a quantum-theoryish explanation for the strange goings on that feels redundant in a story that functions just fine as magical fantasy. I'm prepared to take on trust that Jemisin captures the specificity of her Brooklyn and Queens protagonists, but a character called Bel Nguyen, visiting from London, speaks like no Londoner I've ever met. At one point, as part of a magic counterspell, Manny throws a five-dollar bill on to the ground and Bel joins in by chucking a pound note. I wonder how long he'd been holding on to that item of long-discontinued currency. Still, pedantry isn't the right way to approach Jemisin. That she is not an especially decorous writer is a feature, not a bug: "AAAAaaaaAAAAaaaa (breath) aaaaAAAAaaaaaaaaa," yells one character, to which a nearby New Yorker replies: "Shut your fucking mouth!" Running through all of The City We Became is Jemisin's fizzing, vivid energy - we might add "urban" and "street" as descriptions too, acknowledging the ways these terms have become so racially, and often negatively, coded. Jemisin is well aware of this; her novel dramatises, and her characters specifically discuss, the city's legacies of racism and bigotry. But none of this detracts from the fact that Jemisin just loves New York. That affection, that partiality, is all over this novel. Batman's Gotham is a grim place populated (the Dark Knight himself aside) entirely by criminals and cowering victims. Jemisin's New York is more like Spiderman's, a place in which the villains are the establishment - cops and corporations - and heroism is the bailiwick of ordinary New Yorkers. Given Lovecraft's personal racism and his dislike of New York, something to which the novel specifically alludes, the metropolis's Lovecraftian antagonist hardly stands a chance.
Kirkus Review
This extremely urban fantasy, a love/hate song to and rallying cry for the author's home of New York, expands her story "The City, Born Great" (from How Long 'Til Black Future Month, 2018).When a great city reaches the point when it's ready to come to life, it chooses a human avatar, who guides the city through its birthing and contends with an extradimensional Enemy who seeks to strike at this vulnerable moment. Now, it is New York City's time to be born, but its avatar is too weakened by the battle to complete the process. So each of the individual boroughs instantiates its own avatar to continue the fight. Manhattan is a multiracial grad student new to the city with a secret violent past that he can no longer quite remember; Brooklyn is an African American rap star-turned-lawyer and city councilwoman; Queens is an Indian math whiz here on a visa; the Bronx is a tough Lenape woman who runs a nonprofit art center; and Staten Island is a frightened and insular Irish American woman who wants nothing to do with the other four. Can these boroughs successfully awaken and heal their primary avatar and repel the invading white tentacles of the Enemy? The novel is a bold calling out of the racial tensions dividing not only New York City, but the U.S. as a whole; it underscores that people of color are an integral part of the city's tapestry even if some white people prefer to treat them as interlopers. It's no accident that the only white avatar is the racist woman representing Staten Island, nor that the Enemy appears as a Woman in White who employs the forces of racism and gentrification in her invasion; her true self is openly inspired by the tropes of the xenophobic author H.P. Lovecraft. Although the story is a fantasy, many aspects of the plot draw on contemporary incidents. In the real world, white people don't need a nudge from an eldritch abomination to call down a violent police reaction on people of color innocently conducting their daily lives, and just as in the book, third parties are fraudulently transferring property deeds from African American homeowners in Brooklyn, and gentrification forces out the people who made the neighborhood attractive in the first place. In the face of these behaviors, whataboutism, #BothSides, and #NotAllWhitePeople are feeble arguments.Fierce, poetic, uncompromising. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
People feel the moods of the cities they live in. Sometimes the cities themselves become living things, connected to all the lives within their limits. New York City has been born, but there is an otherworldly and dark force determined to destroy those connections and overlay itself. It will take the soul of the city to deal with the enemy. Of course it isn't so simple: New York is six souls: the five boroughs and the whole, and getting them to work together will be challenging. The pains of gentrification, bias, and hatred for anyone "other" is starting to take root, spread by the power that wants to take over. Can these distinct souls find a way to come together before the enemy takes hold, or will the city bend to a power literally out of this world? VERDICT Jemisin (The Broken Earth) writes a harsh love story to one of America's most famous places. As raw and vibrant as the city itself, the prose pushes the boundaries of fantasy and brings home what residents already know--their city is alive. [See Prepub Alert, 9/16/19.]--Kristi Chadwick, Massachusetts Lib. Syst., Northampton
