I love how it immediately shifts the moral scales of the story and makes you really have to think.

And THE CITY WE BECAME does something quite interesting with this concept and how it revolves around cities being born. That is the one concept I will always be immediately captivated by no matter how many times I’ve read about it. What really and truly hooked me in as a reader though was the discussion of the multiverse and alternate dimensions. Jemisin is a master of giving us those whammies amid what seems like a narrative slowdown. Come back to me once you’ve found out everything about the character of Kendra and I dare you to tell me you aren’t left completely heartbroken by it. There’s also a lot of heartbreaking honesty that happens in smaller moments throughout this novel. Every borough, even Staten Island (which this book gave me quite the interesting perspective on), shines in its own unique way. I can only imagine, with some degree of jealousy, how much of a delight this story will be for actual locals. It’s impossible to walk away from this cast without feeling like you have some small pulse on the city of New York. We have a homeless gay Black man, a former rapper turned city councilor, and an older queer Indigenous woman all peppered throughout the novel among others. Each of the main characters in this story exist at the intersections of life. I don’t think I’m surprising anyone by saying Jemisin avoided that completely. Some of our most fondly held up fictional expressions of New York City are painfully straight and white. We all know New York is one of the most diverse cities on the planet, but popular fiction has often done a very poor job of putting that on display. It’s a novel that eloquently pushes back against the long held American romance with the rural and it does this not by degrading the rural but showing just how much urban life is in the fabric of the American identity too. Just as The Broken Earth trilogy was a treatise on the leylines of oppression, THE CITY WE BECAME is a dissertation on the power of our collective urban existence and the stories that emerge from it. Jemisin is a genius and at I think at this point it’s indisputable. A roiling, ancient evil stirs in the halls of power, threatening to destroy the city and her six newborn avatars unless they can come together and stop it once and for all. Some are as ancient as myths, and others are as new and destructive as children.

The city we became amazon