Stuff I Read: The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin

When an otherworldly entity endangers the awakening of the next great city—New York—the city chooses an avatar to defend it. But when that avatar vanishes and increasingly strange and alien things happen in the city, five disparate strangers, each representing a borough, are conscripted into the fight, whether they want to or not. N.K. Jemisin takes a weird and wonderful look into what makes New York a great city in her 2020 urban fantasy, The City We Became.

And because I like you, SPOILERS AHEAD.

The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin

The City We Became posits that when a city becomes diverse, populous, and culturally relevant enough, it evolves into a living, breathing organism, and that organism chooses and immortal vessel that acts as its guardian. As New York is about to awaken, it chooses a guardian: a young, homeless man with no name who has been spray painting mouths on rooftops and is shocked when he notices them breathing. And in his role as the newly drafted defender of the living city, the kid becomes aware that something isn’t right. Shadows take odd shapes, buildings seem superimposed on one another, and he finds himself relentlessly pursued by police… or rather, monsters wearing policemen as suits. During this confrontation, the young man becomes one with the city and commands it to repel an attack by Lovecraftian horrors. However, after pushing back the darkness, he vanishes, and five strangers awaken to the call of the living city. They are Manny, who arrives at Grand Central Station about to start a new life, suddenly amnesiac about his past; Brooklyn, a former hip-hop pioneer turned councilwoman; Padmini, a brilliant immigrant mathematician living with her family in Queens; Bronca, the director of a Bronx community center who is descended from the original inhabitants of the region, the Lenape Tribe; and Aislyn, the sheltered daughter of an abusive racist cop who has never left Staten Island. These five must band together, beat back this extradimensional horror show, and find the original avatar so the city can truly be born. If they don’t kill each other first.

The City We Became is a love letter to New York and all its beauty and grime. The concept that the city is alive is one that resonates with me on a deep level; for years, it’s been something I’ve said to people who have never been there and asked me what it’s like. The world Jemisin creates is as alive and vibrant as I’ve always thought. You can feel the steel and asphalt absorb and amplify the heat of summer, smell the sun-baked trash, and hear the rumble of the subway. The story’s protagonists are such quintessential New Yorkers that it feels like a meme: tell me what borough you’re from without telling me what borough you’re from. The characters—and their powers—represent their boroughs incredibly well, and in a way that makes perfect sense if you know anything at all about New York or spent any length of time there. I’m also a big fan of the way Jemisin embraces NYC’s diversity in a way that novels set in New York rarely do. Gone is the whitewashed, money-centric view of the Big Apple, replaced with a cast full of BIPOC characters that represent the makeup of the city more accurately. Cleverly, Jemisin’s depiction of the city’s adversary takes the form of gentrifiers, culture vultures, overzealous police, racists, xenophobes, and “Karen.” These are played as concepts given form by extradimensional eldritch mind control, and fit so seamlessly into today’s goings-on that after reading this, you may swear that you see an ethereal white tendril rising from the head of these people when you encounter them on Facebook.

The downside is that this book is very New York; despite extensive scene description and deep character development, if your familiarity with New York is limited to news stories and movies, then a lot of the nuance will go over your head. You won’t be able to properly envision where things are, and how neighborhoods are delineated. It’s possible that my being a native New Yorker—Brooklyn-born, Brooklyn-bred, and all that—I’m able to connect certain dots that may or may not be there intentionally. Also, the avatars of the boroughs—all of them well-crafted characters—are such incredible borough stereotypes that it borders on being artfully cliché. That said, these are minor gripes, found only because I was looking for them. This is a brilliant work of art, cover to cover.

The City We Became takes a fantastical dive into how awesome New York City is and why that’s the case. The city is greater than the sum of its parts, even if one of those parts is Staten Island*, and even if none of those parts are greater than Brooklyn.

Buy this book.

*Clearly, I’m joking. Staten Island hasn’t done anything wrong to me, and you can’t be mad at the birthplace of the Wu-Tang Clan.

Pros: Great story, well-developed characters, vivid locale. Will make you fall in love with New York City if you aren’t already.

Cons: Relies heavily on background knowledge of NYC.

Rating: 5 out 5 stars.