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• The city we became: Is the city we must read

  A whirlwind of a journey through New York which describes and glorifies the nuances of The City that never sleeps through the persepctive of it's most integral part it's citizens. Fiction on a next level a definite page turner and coming of as effortless yet lot of research has been put in it to strike the right balance. N.K Jemisin really brings out the magic in this book that by the end of it, you would be thinking when the next book in this series is coming out.

• One of the Best Books of the Year

  It’s 4 a.m. and I just finished The City We Became. I can’t remember the last time I stayed up in to the early hours of the morning to finish a book. I’ve never purposely drank an energy drink at 11 p.m. to make sure this happens, but The City We Became deserved it because it is simply one of my favorite books I’ve ever read. Let me back up and give a quick synopsis for the book before we dive in to the review: Five New Yorkers must come together in order to defend their city in the first book of a stunning new series by Hugo award-winning and NYT bestselling author N. K. Jemisin. 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. This book excels on every front: it has characters that are simultaneously totally real and complete stereotypes of the boroughs they represent. It has such solid world building in its use of NYC, you can see the sights, smell the streets, feel the living, breathing city ooze off the pages. The plot is such a great tale of unification, a celebration of a city but also just humans as a whole, of the strength of evil and what it takes to overcome it. The writing is, of course with N.K. Jemisin, of the highest caliber. This book is a legitimate piece of art. It’s heart and soul are bared for the world to see and it absolutely shines. What has been crafted and so tightly, excellently written here is nothing short of brilliance. There have been so very few books that have left me with this feeling, I can’t even think of what the last one was. There is so so much I want to say about this book. The use of diverse, real people in a city like NYC is entirely perfect and fitting but stands out for how well written and used they are, especially when their nemesis brings out the alt-right, shitty racist cops and gentrification as a form of its evil. The evils that really face NYC and, to an extent, all big cities in real life are superbly used and fit in to the narrative effectively. There’s a sequence towards the end of the book – around the 75% mark – that by total coincidence feels oddly prescient of current conditions with Covid19. You know no one could have seen this coming but, like, how is it so scarily accurate? And it just feels wonderful to say I finally feel like someone has given Lovecraft and all his horrible racist views the justice and send off he deserves. Something small but also super awesome I wanted to point out that shows the level of care and craft Jemisin has put in to this novel – the one character from England, Bel, is so realistically written. Jemisin has him using language and slang I haven’t heard since I was a kid living in England, and it was surreal to see it so accurately used. I’ve read plenty of English authors who haven’t used slang so well. I honestly don’t know where to go with this review from here other than to say to anyone at all that may read this: please please please go buy this book. It is absolutely astonishing and wonderful and you won’t regret a second of the time you spend with it. It is one of my personal favorite books I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. I will be talking to anyone and everyone I can about this story for a long, long time to come.

• An Outstanding Imaginative Achievement.

  The thing that impressed me most about 'The City We Became' was the imaginative power behind it. Not simply in the basic concept of a city coming to life. That is pretty impressive by itself, though the basic concept of the inanimate coming to life has been around in one form or another for a long time - though rarely (if ever) on this scale! But Jemisin doesn't just come up with the idea, she holds it together and develops it throughout the book. There are occasions when authors, even good ones, can't sustain their idea. The plot becomes a bit thin, the idea starts to feel unwieldy, cracks appear. Under the pressure of developing events, the fabric of the created universe starts to tear, and the reader's willing desire to suspend disbelief (an essential to enjoy fantasy, if not fiction of all sorts) is pushed beyond its limits. When the internal consistency of a world fails, because the author just can't make it work, then the story has gone beyond the limits of imagination. It never happens here. The concept is huge, bizarre, surreal - but it never gets inconsistent, the parts never fail to mesh together. The imagination never fails. And that is a massive achievement in a fantasy work on this scale. As for the rest - the word flow is as good as you'd expect for a writer at this level, not a single awkward phrase or clumsy bit of wording to pull the reader out of their involvement with the action. Action which is fast and furious all the way through. Well developed characters - all embodying their own part of New York. Deeper and deeper mysteries, constantly unfolding. Some sharp social commentary. A deep understanding and love of the City of New York, with all it's grime and brilliance. Looking forward to the next part of the trilogy.

• Wonderfully creative, hard to put down

  The author does a fantastic job of capturing the 'personalities' of NYC's boroughs (not forgetting Jersey City! ) It was great to read a book that inspired my brain to work at picturing what was written. It is so darn interesting and creative I was happy to do the work.

• What comes next?

  There are some features of the novel I might object to: the total disappearance of Italian-Americans from NYC (at least New York as represented by Jemisin), the fact that the only white character is bad (but it's a complex character which is a victim even when she acts as a villain--or an accomplice of the Arch-Villain), the presence of the occasional ideological complaint (like some comments on Gauguin and Picasso...). And yet I think this is one of the best crossover novels I've recently read... I might also talk of avant-pop, here. And having read it in two days, I want to read the other two novels of the trilogy as soon as possible, which should mean The City We Became is good stuff, after all. Moreover, I appreciated the way Jemisin plays Lovecraft against Lovecraft--though I cannot say more about that as it would be Spoiler City!

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