The City We Became, blurb
Every city has a soul. Some are as ancient as myths, and others are as new and destructive as children. New York City? She’s got five.
But every city also has a dark side. A roiling, ancient evil stirs beneath the earth, threatening to destroy the city and her five protectors unless they can come together and stop it once and for all.
The City We Became, review
The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin is both a love letter and a “fuck you” to urban living. It explores what it means to be a New Yorker, and what it means to identify as a citizen of a city in general. All of the little points of pride that you love, but also all of the things that annoy you. Even some things that you hate.
Think about it. Every city has a different character, right? They each have a different feel to them. Chicago isn’t New York. Glasgow isn’t London. Barcelona isn’t Madrid. The City We Became explores that concept a little further, imagining these cities as individual living entities that are eventually birthed from the collective thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes of those who live there. The good and the bad.
But for a something to be born, there has to be a midwife, right?
This is where our character cast comes in. Something went wrong during the birth of New York. The city then appointed five avatars — one from each of the five boroughs — to protect it from the attack of an extraplanar enemy. These five people need to come together to prevent their city from being wiped off the map.
If you’ve read any of N.K. Jemisin’s stories before, then you’ll know that she’s a hell of a writer. If you’ve never read any of her stories before, then I’m telling you: she’s a hell of a writer. The writing in The City We Became is a little bit more experimental than her Broken Earth trilogy. Specifically, she plays with punctuation and structure in certain ways to convey the emotion of a scene. Some paragraphs are cut short to show shock. Others consist solely of long, non-punctuated sentences to communicate anxiety and adrenaline. Personally, I found this to be incredibly effective. I was absorbed into the fabric of this book, and tore through it in around a day.
The message, as always, is delivered loud and clear. It’s a demand for unity. A backhanded slap across the face of nihilistic bullshit. It says that yeah, sure, not all of us have to get along, but we can at least agree that there is some shit happening right now that is just fucking wrong, and we have to do something about it.
This is very much a conceptual story, giving more focus to its message than individual characterization. I found that the antagonistic forces were a little vague to begin with, but I quickly got on board once I realized what they were supposed to represent. Jemisin also does a great job at conveying the personality of each of the main character cast, although I got the feeling that actual Americans and New Yorkers would get a lot more out of these portrayals than I would.
Part of me wishes that we’d got to see a little more of the world outside of NYC, as the glimpses we get of the wider world are very interesting. This book was always gonna center around NYC (obviously), but admittedly this ties into my one major gripe. So much western media (and Hollywood in particular) constantly presents New York as the entirety of the world. And while The City We Became has a healthy dose of self-criticism, it does at times feel as though it buys into the American exceptionalism narrative. Sure, other cities had their own unique challenges, but NYC is different because it’s just so much bigger and better.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m just jaded, and maybe I’ve just consumed too much US-centric media. For all of my criticisms, though, there’s room for this wider world to be explored in the sequels. At least this book is self-aware. And for all of those god-bless-america stories that have been forced down my throat through the years, this one is different in that it centers different people who deserve to have their story told.
To wrap this up, The City We Became is a hell of a book. The closest comparison I can think of is American Gods, although I wouldn’t fully commit to that since it’s also entirely its own thing. I loved how it was written, loved that it was full of criticism as well as praise, and loved that the main character cast didn’t necessarily have to like each other.
If you love contemporary fantasy, buy this book. If you love books with a strong sense of right and wrong, buy this book. There are some stories that have such a powerful charisma that they fill your mind with sound and thought and colour. This is one of those. Buy this book.
We received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for a fair and honest review. Thanks to Orbit UK for the review copy!
THE CITY WE BECAME releases 24th March in eBook and 26th March in hardback!
