Jemisin provides a diverse cast of avatars, spanning Black, interracial, Indigenous, and Asian perspectives, who embody each borough’s unique composite of historical and current cultural identities. This emergency forces the city to awaken five additional avatars, one for each borough. In the novel’s urban cosmology, a newborn city requires an avatar to help birth and defend it in this case, the avatar is a homeless, queer, Black youth whose exhausting work as the city’s “midwife” throws him into a coma. The City We Became is about what happens when a centuries-old city finally awakens into sentiency.
It’s a stunning coup that manages to place The City We Became firmly in the urban fantasy and sci-fi canon while demonstrating the radical potential of the genre, in the hands of a brilliant writer like Jemisin, to expand the boundaries of old tropes and forms to make room for self-awareness, critique, and social justice. This imaginative and ferocious fantasy novel about the birth of New York City makes wily use of Lovecraftian tropes - tentacled creatures, sentient architecture, gaping holes into hellish dimensions - as well as Lovecraft’s well-known xenophobia and bigotry, to subvert the notion that New York is a white city, or that it can be saved by whiteness in any literal or metaphorical iteration. Jemisin’s The City We Became is texting a little heart emoji wrapped around an extended middle finger to H.
This book is apparently the beginning of a trilogy, but it is completely satisfying as a standalone novel. I also got a little Wrinkle in Time vibe. Tension, humor, great characters, with a guest appearance near and dear to me from Jersey City.
The City We Became might just be my favorite book to be published in 2020. Jemisin's books, I love New York City, and I love this book about the soul and personification of New York. This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month The City We Became by N.
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