Reading: The City We Became (177/365)
Jun. 26th, 2021 06:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_hartN.K. Jemisin's The City We Became is an expansion of her 2016 short story The City Born Great (a slightly amended version of the short story forms the prologue of the novel), in which a young homeless gay man becomes the living avatar of New York City and has to fight an ancient enemy to ensure that the city can come to life, as happens to all great cities in this world. I have to confess that I didn't actually like the short story much when I read it; I could see it was good, but the descriptions of the Enemy's manifestations as tentacled eldritch abominations was a bit closer to horror than I usually read, and there were bits I found rather squicky.
In the novel, the city's victory over the Enemy turns out not to have been as complete as it seemed in the short story. Worn out from the initial battle, the primary avatar of the city is hidden away for safekeeping, and it's left to the avatars of the five boroughs to take up the fight: Manhattan, a young man who's just arrived in the city, trying to leave a difficult past behind him; Brooklyn, a former rapper turned local politician; Padmini, or Queen's, a student from India, trying to do well enough to get a job in finance and a visa to stay in the US; Bronca, a Native American artist who has seen many battles in her day; and Aislyn, a young woman who has never left Staten Island, where she lives with her abusive father. The novel follows the five avatars as they try to find each other and defeat the Enemy, who is continuing to attack the city using a combination of techniques both eldritch (tentacled apparitions) and mundane (gentrification, racism, the incursion of identikit chain stores diminishing the city's distinctive identity; this is not a novel that's subtle about its social commentary).
At its heart, The City We Became is a love letter to New York in the form of a Lovecraft-inspired urban fantasy. I suspect I'd have got more out of it if I knew much about either New York or Lovecraft, or even if I was someone who liked spending time in cities, but even so I liked it a lot; it's sassy and pacy and fun, and I loved the different characters of the boroughs and watching them gradually learning to trust each other and work together.
In the novel, the city's victory over the Enemy turns out not to have been as complete as it seemed in the short story. Worn out from the initial battle, the primary avatar of the city is hidden away for safekeeping, and it's left to the avatars of the five boroughs to take up the fight: Manhattan, a young man who's just arrived in the city, trying to leave a difficult past behind him; Brooklyn, a former rapper turned local politician; Padmini, or Queen's, a student from India, trying to do well enough to get a job in finance and a visa to stay in the US; Bronca, a Native American artist who has seen many battles in her day; and Aislyn, a young woman who has never left Staten Island, where she lives with her abusive father. The novel follows the five avatars as they try to find each other and defeat the Enemy, who is continuing to attack the city using a combination of techniques both eldritch (tentacled apparitions) and mundane (gentrification, racism, the incursion of identikit chain stores diminishing the city's distinctive identity; this is not a novel that's subtle about its social commentary).
At its heart, The City We Became is a love letter to New York in the form of a Lovecraft-inspired urban fantasy. I suspect I'd have got more out of it if I knew much about either New York or Lovecraft, or even if I was someone who liked spending time in cities, but even so I liked it a lot; it's sassy and pacy and fun, and I loved the different characters of the boroughs and watching them gradually learning to trust each other and work together.
no subject
Date: 2021-06-27 03:28 pm (UTC)