Hardcover, 437 pages
English language
Published April 6, 2020 by Orbit.
Five New Yorkers must come together in order to defend their city.
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.
NK Jemisin is an incredibly good writer. This book makes me feel the injustice happening to these charters in such a strong way, that I have to take breaks. This book also celebrates black joy, and the important place various cultures have in our cities. This book feels like a victory lap, and after winning 3 straight Hugos, Jemisin continued on to show why she is one of the best writers of our time.
Content warning Spoilers
A unique fantasy story of struggle against an eldritch horror by the diverse "avatars" of New York City as the city is "born" as a sentient entity. The enemy is an alien intelligence, so alien that it comes from another dimension and can't really be contemplated due to its "wrongness." Its manifestation in this world is simply: whiteness. It's a parasitic, devious, violent, very white entity who claims if it doesn't destroy this world, its own world will die. I was ok with being hit over the head with the symbolism, since sometimes I miss subtle stuff. It's been said this book is about gentrification...it seemed to me it's also about white colonization. An otherwise three-star story but I'm giving four stars for its unique ideas & world building.
Lots of character, lots of sense of place. I liked the different avatars of New York and the twist at the end. Looking forward to the next book.
The bad news first: it's not quite up to the standards set with the Broken Earth Trilogy. Followed by the good news: this is still an excellent start to Jemisin's new trilogy about living cities and I liked it a lot.
The prologue is the short story I already read in How Long Til Black Future Month, in which a young homeless man becomes the city of New York with the help of the embodiment of Sao Paulo, and defeats a threat. But the threat weakens New York, and so he needs the help of the five boroughs Manhattan, Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island to help him battle the Lovecraftian nemesis that is trying to take over New York. The embodied boroughs have to find each other and join up to find New York, and that's not as easy as it seems, as their foe does everything to stop …
The bad news first: it's not quite up to the standards set with the Broken Earth Trilogy. Followed by the good news: this is still an excellent start to Jemisin's new trilogy about living cities and I liked it a lot.
The prologue is the short story I already read in How Long Til Black Future Month, in which a young homeless man becomes the city of New York with the help of the embodiment of Sao Paulo, and defeats a threat. But the threat weakens New York, and so he needs the help of the five boroughs Manhattan, Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island to help him battle the Lovecraftian nemesis that is trying to take over New York. The embodied boroughs have to find each other and join up to find New York, and that's not as easy as it seems, as their foe does everything to stop them.
This book is woke as fuck. The boroughs are all PoC with the exception of Staten Island, four out of five are female, some are queer, and they fight against the alt-right, cybermobbing, and capitalism. The PoC are African-American, Tamil, Native American, and in the acknowledgements they all had their own sensitivity readers. It's a giant love letter to New York, and makes me want to go there again, even though that's as far away as possible now. It's also a giant fuck-you to militant Lovecraft fans as HP Lovecraft gets called out as a racist, sexist, homophobic dipshit, and then the Mythos is used anyhow to represent the enemy.
Damn, I felt bad for Staten Island. This book made me feel sympathetic to a racist bigot from the burbs.
It's a great book, but it does not have the twist and turns that Broken Earth had. Still, if you enjoyed any of her work, you might enjoy her take on urban fantasy and Lovecraftian horrors as well.
