Review: The City We Became, by N.K. Jemisin

[Russ Allbery]

The City We Became
by N.K. Jemisin

Series:    The Great Cities Trilogy #1
Publisher: Orbit
Copyright: March 2020
ISBN:      0-316-50985-X
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     449

At an unpredictable point after a city has accumulated enough history,
character, and sense of itself, it is born as a living creature. It
selects an avatar who both embodies the city and helps it be born. But
in that moment of birth, a city is at its most vulnerable, and that is
when the Enemy attacks.

The birth of cities and the Enemy attacks have happened for millennia,
so the cities that have survived the process have developed a system.
The most recently born goes to assist the avatar with the birthing
process and help fight off Enemy attacks. But the process has become
riskier and the last two cities have failed to be born, snuffed out in
natural disasters despite that support.

Now, it's New York City's turn. It selects its avatar and survives the
initial assault with the help of São Paulo. But something still goes
wrong, and it is severely injured in the process. Complicating matters,
now there are five more avatars, one for each borough, who will have to
unite to fight off the Enemy. And, for the first time, the Enemy has
taken human form and is attacking with reason and manipulation and
intelligence, not just force.

The City We Became has a great premise: take the unique sense of place
that defines a city and turn it into a literalized character in a
fantasy novel. The avatars are people who retain their own lives and
understanding (with one exception that I'll get to in a moment), but
gain an awareness of the city they represent. They can fight and repair
their city through sympathetic magic and metaphor made real. The
prelude that introduces this concept (adapted from Jemisin's earlier
short story "The City Born Great") got too gonzo for me, but once
Jemisin settles into the main story and introduces avatars with a bit
more distance from the city they represent, the premise clicked.

The execution, on the other hand, I thought was strained. The biggest
problem is that the premise requires an ensemble cast of five borough
avatars, the primary avatar, São Paulo, and the Enemy. That's already a
lot, but for the story to work each avatar has to be firmly grounded in
their own unique experience of New York, which adds family members,
colleagues, and roommates. That's too much to stuff into one novel,
which means characters get short shrift. For example, Padmini, the
avatar of Queens, gets a great introductory scene and a beautiful bit
of characterization that made her one of my favorite characters, but
then all but disappears for the remainder of the book. She's in the
scenes, but not in a way that matters. Brooklyn and Aislyn get moments
of deep characterization, but there's so much else going on that they
felt rushed. And what ever happened to Manny's roommate?

The bulk of the characterization in this book goes to Broncha, the
Bronx avatar, a Lenape woman and a tough-as-nails administrator of a
community art museum and maker space. The dynamics between her and her
co-workers, her mentorship of Veneza, and her early encounters with the
Woman in White are my favorite parts of the book. I thought she and
Brooklyn were a useful contrast: two very different ways of finding a
base of power in the city without letting go of one's ideals.

But before we get to Broncha, we first meet Manny, the Manhattan
avatar. Thematically, I thought what Jemisin did here was extremely
clever. Manny's past is essentially erased at the start of the book,
making him the reader insert character to start making sense of this
world. This parallels the typical tourist experience of arriving in
Manhattan and trying to use it to make sense of New York. He's
disconnected from the rest of the city because he's the dangerous
newcomer with power but not a lot of understanding, which works with my
model of the political dynamics of Manhattan.

Unfortunately, he's not an interesting person. I appreciated what was
happening at the metaphorical layer, but Manny veers between action
hero and exposition prompt, and his amnesia meant I never got enough
sense of him as a character to care that much about what happened to
him. I thought his confrontation with the Woman in White near the start
of the book, which establishes the major villain of the book, felt
clunky and forced compared to her later encounters with the other
characters.

The Woman in White, though, is a great villain. It's clear from earlier
on that the Enemy is Lovecraftian, but the Woman in White mixes mad
scientist glee, manic enthusiasm, and a child-like amusement at the
weirdness of humanity into the more typical tropes of tentacles,
corruption, and horrific creatures. One of my qualms about reading this
book is that I'm not a horror fan and don't enjoy the mental images of
unspeakable monsters, but the Woman in White puts such a fascinating
spin on them that I enjoyed the scenes in which she appeared. I think
the book was at its best when she was trying to psychologically
manipulate the characters or attack them with corrupted but
pre-existing power structures. I was less interested when it turned
into an action-movie fight against animated monsters.

The other place Jemisin caught me by surprise is too much of a spoiler
to describe in detail (and skip the next paragraph in its entirety if
you want to avoid all spoilers):

Jemisin didn't take the moral conflict of the book in the direction I
was expecting. This book is more interested in supporting the people
who are already acting ethically than in redeeming people who make bad
choices. That produces a deus ex machina ending that's a bit abrupt,
but I appreciated the ethical stance.

Overall, I thought the premise was great but the execution was unsteady
and a bit overstuffed. There are some great characters and some great
scenes, but to me they felt disjointed and occasionally rushed. You
also need to enjoy characters taking deep pride in the feel of a
specific place and advocating for it with the vigor of a sports
rivalry, along with loving descriptions of metaphors turned into
magical waves of force. But, if you can roll with that, there are
moments of real awe. Jemisin captured for me the joy that comes from a
deeply grounded sense of connection to a place.

Recommended, albeit with caveats, if you're in the mood for reading
about people who love the city they live in.

This is the first book of a planned trilogy and doesn't resolve the
main conflict, but it reaches a satisfying conclusion. The title of the
next book has not yet been announced at the time of this review.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Reviewed: 2021-01-25

URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-316-50985-X.html

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>