Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Jemisin's latest novel expands her short story The City Born Great (from How Long 'Til Black Future Month, 2018) about the birth of the avatar of New York City. As the primary avatar of the city lies in a coma, five people begin to experience mysterious new powers as they each become an avatar for one of the City's five boroughs. Each of the new avatars must deal with the attentions of the Enemy, a mysterious force determined to stop the birth of any new city. The Woman in White, a bizarre and alien creature disguised in human form, unleashes not only strange eldritch creatures from another reality but also uses the forces of racism and gentrification to try to frustrate the new boroughs at every turn. With all this and possible betrayal by one of their own, the newborn avatars of New York City have their work cut out for them. While a marked shift from Jemisin's usual creation of magical other worlds, this contemporary fantasy of living cities in a multiversal struggle demonstrates her accomplished storytelling and characterization. Highly recommended for anyone interested in some of the most exciting and powerful fantasy writing of today. [HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Triple-Hugo-winner (for the Broken Earth trilogy) Jemisin's latest will attract both media attention and curious readers, even those who don't typically read genre fiction.] Copyright 2019 Booklist Reviews.
BookPage Reviews
The City We Became
What makes a city feel the way it does? Is it the art and the music? The people and how they view themselves? What about the infinite, minuscule details of the place, whether they are recognized or ignored completely? Three-time Hugo Award winner N.K. Jemisin shows us her version of the answers, and they add up to something bigger than the sum of its parts. In The City We Became, a magical novel of breadth and precision, Jemisin builds a version of New York City that is more than the borders of its boroughs. This New York is alive.
Cities, we learn, are like any other living organism. They are born, they develop, they get sick, they can die. Like a hive communicating through a shared consciousness, a city is sustained by everyone and everything in it. At a certain stage of life, cities awaken avatars, people who are attuned to this consciousness, able to understand it and, from time to time, channel its power.
Cities also have enemies. When a primordial evil arrives through space and time, hellbent on corrupting and destroying New York, the avatars of all five boroughs awaken to do battle—and fight off what could be the death of the city.
I've not read another book like this in years. Jemisin takes a concept that can be abstracted to the simplest of questions (What if cities were alive?) and wraps an adventure around it. That adventure takes center stage in the many scenes that read more like a superhero movie than a fantasy novel, such as when a towering Lovecraftian tentacle bursts from the river to destroy the Williamsburg Bridge. However, Jemisin's most beautiful passages deliver attentive descriptions of New York's melting pot of people. Her characters' life experiences—racial, sexual, financial—bring perspectives that are deeply important to and often missing from contemporary literature, particularly in the fantasy genre.
Jemisin lives in Brooklyn, and it's clear that New York has impacted her life in innumerable ways. I confess, I don't know New York well myself, but reading this book left me thinking about my own city, how I'm connected to it and how far I would go to save it. To what parts of the whole have I contributed? If it were alive, what would it say?
Copyright 2020 BookPage Reviews.Kirkus Reviews
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 b old 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 n eighborhood attractive in the first place. In the face of these behaviors, whataboutism, #BothSides, and #NotAllWhitePeople are feeble arguments. Fierce, poetic, uncompromising. Copyright Kirkus 2019 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.
Library Journal Reviews
Every city has a soul, and in this new work, poundingly exciting New York City has six, as suggested by the six newborn avatars about to come to its rescue. An ancient evil is rising up, ready to level the city. The start of a new series from the
Library Journal Reviews
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?
Publishers Weekly Reviews
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.)
Copyright 2020 Publishers Weekly.