It’s 4 a.m. and I just finished The City We Became. I can’t remember the last time I stayed up in to the early hours of the morning to finish a book. I’ve never purposely drank an energy drink at 11 p.m. to make sure this happens, but The City We Became deserved it because it is simply one of my favorite books I’ve ever read.
Let me back up and give a quick synopsis for the book before we dive in to the review:
Five New Yorkers must come together in order to defend their city in the first book of a stunning new series by Hugo award-winning and NYT bestselling author N. K. Jemisin. 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.
This book excels on every front: it has characters that are simultaneously totally real and complete stereotypes of the boroughs they represent. It has such solid world building in its use of NYC, you can see the sights, smell the streets, feel the living, breathing city ooze off the pages. The plot is such a great tale of unification, a celebration of a city but also just humans as a whole, of the strength of evil and what it takes to overcome it. The writing is, of course with N.K. Jemisin, of the highest caliber.
This book is a legitimate piece of art. It’s heart and soul are bared for the world to see and it absolutely shines. What has been crafted and so tightly, excellently written here is nothing short of brilliance. There have been so very few books that have left me with this feeling, I can’t even think of what the last one was.
There is so so much I want to say about this book. The use of diverse, real people in a city like NYC is entirely perfect and fitting but stands out for how well written and used they are, especially when their nemesis brings out the alt-right, shitty racist cops and gentrification as a form of its evil. The evils that really face NYC and, to an extent, all big cities in real life are superbly used and fit in to the narrative effectively. There’s a sequence towards the end of the book – around the 75% mark – that by total coincidence feels oddly prescient of current conditions with Covid19. You know no one could have seen this coming but, like, how is it so scarily accurate? And it just feels wonderful to say I finally feel like someone has given Lovecraft and all his horrible racist views the justice and send off he deserves.
Something small but also super awesome I wanted to point out that shows the level of care and craft Jemisin has put in to this novel – the one character from England, Bel, is so realistically written. Jemisin has him using language and slang I haven’t heard since I was a kid living in England, and it was surreal to see it so accurately used. I’ve read plenty of English authors who haven’t used slang so well.
I honestly don’t know where to go with this review from here other than to say to anyone at all that may read this: please please please go buy this book. It is absolutely astonishing and wonderful and you won’t regret a second of the time you spend with it. It is one of my personal favorite books I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. I will be talking to anyone and everyone I can about this story for a long, long time to come.
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Popular Highlights in this book
“People who say change is impossible are usually pretty happy with things just as they are.”Highlighted by 1,747 Kindle readers- This is the lesson: Great cities are like any other living things, being born and maturing and wearying and dying in their turn.Highlighted by 1,110 Kindle readers
- “Real gods aren’t what most of you Christians think of as gods. Gods are people. Sometimes dead people, sometimes still alive. Sometimes never lived.” She shrugs. “They do jobs—bring fortune, look after people, make sure the world works as it should. They fall in love. Have babies. Fight. Die.” She shrugs. “It’s duty. It’s normal. Get over it.”Highlighted by 1,033 Kindle readers
- “The harbingers of the Enemy will hide among the city’s parasites. Beware of them.”Highlighted by 711 Kindle readers
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Book arrived damaged
Book has some nasty substance on it. I'm going to attempt to clean it because I want to start reading this book asap but GROSS!
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Christina
Wonderfully creative, hard to put down
Reviewed in Canada on December 2, 2022
