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N. K. Jemisin: The City We Became (Hardcover, 2020, Orbit) 4 stars

Five New Yorkers must come together in order to defend their city.

Every city has …

Review of 'The City We Became' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

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.