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Loading... The City We Becameby N. K. Jemisin
  
No current Talk conversations about this book.   ) tocaitl. | Jan 1, 2025 |  I found an experience that verges on indescribable. Oh, I can tell you what happened: I put it down, I picked it up. I read the first character, did other things, made myself go back for the second and realized, eureka-like, that this "absorb the city" was gonna be a thing. Oh yes--Jemisin was being very leitmotif and infintesimally advancing the plot while repeating it with a new character each time. Oh boy. I actually took the time out to learn how to use the 'scan' function in my Kindle so that I could start flipping through a bunch of pages to see how long she followed this formula. The characters didn't clarify my ambivalence any. They felt familiar, only with over the top stereotypes. NYC, a homeless young brown-skinned gay man. Manny, our cold-blooded amnesiac Manhattanite of questionable ethnicity and gay leanings. Brooklyn, Black woman, who has re-invented herself, is taking care of the family, and being a successful leader. Queen, a new generation of emigrant, making her home in a tenement, building community and being a caretaker. Bronx, an aging artistic socially conscious lesbian Native. And must we? Oh yes, we must: Staten Island, the alienated white-skinned daughter of a police officer. What was surprisingly interesting to me was personification of the Lovecraftian Beyond. I ended up enjoying it as a character a lot more than I would have expected, especially as a person who naturally roots for good and order. But despite attempts to humanize Brooklyn and Bronx (the history of the others gets short shift, honestly), I ended up disappointed in Jemisin for complete lack of subtlety in messaging. There are some moments of humor which leavened the repetitiveness. There's the modern friend trying to be supportive: “Jesus, B. So, I mean, it’s awesome that, uh, you’re a city? Congratulations! I want to be accepting of this new stage in your identity formation." There's also a little bit of authorial commentary: "They don’t notice because they are unironically playing Marco Polo, yelling at each other in a mix of Mandarin and English and splashing wildly to get away from each other." But the most frequent humor is the classic NYC area in-joke/side-eye: “Well, I mean, just the sight of something awful and incomprehensible isn’t going to send me off frothing at the mouth,” Veneza says. It’s nonchalant, but there is a shaken note to her voice nonetheless. 'I’m from Jersey.'" The in-jokes actually prove the most tiring, because it's trying to pay homage to the network of cultural influences and stereotypes of each borough--sort 0f--by relying mostly on a stereotype on top of stereotype. Not that some don't ring true, but a lot of times it feels self-conscious and tired. This stereotyping of the NYC attitude misses because in my opinion, it isn't just the city's cultural history catch-phrases, but the fact that it is an intersectional point between so many cultures that makes the city great. She creates beautifully solid examples, such as the history with the rock in Central Park, and the kids in the backyard swimming pool in Queens. So maybe its just when she's being overt (oh man, the art gallery; so self-conscious) that it fails. This simplicity in messaging makes it feel younger than it should. It ended up reminding me of José Older's [b:Shadowshaper|22295304|Shadowshaper (Shadowshaper Cypher, #1)|Daniel José Older|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1416429594l/22295304._SX50_.jpg|41683308], and of the two, I think Shadowshaper was more interesting, at least because of the magic. What was right? I still love Jemisin's way with words. I love her diversity of characters, and the combination of thinking and emotion we receive from them. I actually liked the turning away of one of the characters, but you know what might have been more powerful?  ) carol. | Nov 25, 2024 | The premise on which this book is based is that cities, when they achieve a certain size, get born as a person. In this case, because there are five boroughs that make up New York City each borough is a living, breathing human plus there is one more person who is the amalgamation of all five. The first one we meet is Manhattan (or Manny as he likes to be called). He's just arrived in NYC to do graduate studies and he is completely boggled by the things he experiences. You see, just as NYC is about to be born, a visitor from another quantum dimension arrive to take it over. Manny has to fight off the manifestations of this being which involves a wild cab ride down a major freeway brandishing an umbrella. Later he meets the avatar for Brooklyn while fighting off another manifestation of the interloper who is called The Woman in White because that's how she appears when she takes a human form. Together they decide to go find the other boroughs who may be under attack and will need help. Bronca, the avatar for the Bronx, is an older Indigenous artist; Padmini, from Queens, is an East Indian living in NYC on a work visa for her skill with finances; Aislyn is from Staten Island and has never left the Island in all her thirty years. Manny, Brooklyn, Bronca and Padmini team up and are helped by Sao Paulo (the last city to be born) and then Hong Kong who was called by Sao Paulo to help. They believe they need to find Staten Island and then find the avatar for the entire city who will consume them in order to be fully aware. But Aislyn has been persuaded by The Woman in White to join her side and she refuses to join the others. It's a battle for their lives and also the existence of the City. A number of reviews have commented on how the entities threatening the city are something H. P. Lovecraft would have imagined. I believe I tried to read some Lovecraft back in the mists of time but, unusually for me, I didn't finish it. I do know that Lovecraft was a white supremacist so it is interesting that a black author with a multicultural cast of characters should evoke Lovecraftian ideas for the bad guys. It wasn't something I thought about as I listened to this book but now that I've had time to think I can see that Jemisin really drew the lines clearly between the good and bad guys. (  ) gypsysmom | Aug 6, 2024 | The problem with 'The City We Became' is that its sequel isn't out yet and I'm impatient to read it. Jemisin sets up a fascinating premise, full of intriguing details, and peoples it with an appealing and diverse cast. Now that they all know they're New York's avatars and have met one another, I want to see more of their dynamics and find out where the plot goes next. ) annarchism | Aug 4, 2024 | I enjoyed reading this! I haven't read much "weird fiction" before (the only one to mind is The King in Yellow and Other Horror Stories, which I found rather boring); I appreciated this book's take on "weird" fiction and the modernization of it. The concept of cities as people / living entities resonates. I am originally from a very small town and moved to Chicago when young, and cities certainly have an individualized energy to them that I have always enjoyed. While I'm not familiar with Staten Island, Jemisin's description of a more rural-like, "simple" life and beliefs rings true. The power of fear in these communities, particularly, rings true. I like that Jemisin doesn't bog us down with long, technical explanations of how things work. Even Bronca, our link to this world's knowledge, doesn't bother us with that. We're expected to accept magic at face value because it's magic. I do have some quibbles with powers being inconsistently used, but I think for the most part this can be excused as our heroes don't really know how to use their powers. The elevation of different cultures and ways of thinking elevated the story and provided some A-plus social commentary, without devolving into tweets. I think that's been my #1 criticism of recent speculative fiction I've read - the commentary comes tweet-sized and shaped. Not so for Jemisin's work, where the thoughts are more nuanced, more deeply integrated into the story and characters, and shine the truer for it. I'll talk about more specifics in the spoiler section below - but two things stick out to me in the book that I'm not super satisfied with. I think things come very easily to our characters, all the way through. At almost no point do I see consequences for anyone in the story - what are the stakes? The problem with the main stake in the story being the end of the world is that it is intangible. There are two plot points that go against this, but one of them is rather lost, and the other quite short-lived. Secondly, the pacing of the final third or quarter of the book felt a little rushed. The ending in particular, came all at once and resolved in a really unexpected and bizarre (even for weird fiction) way, that I don't think works very well. I do wonder if the story was more complete at some point before the decision was made to write a sequel. Perhaps the sequel addresses some of my concerns. SPOILERS FOR THE ENTIRE BOOK FOLLOW: [I have a lot of mixed feelings about Staten Island's character. We get a lot of good backstory for SI, but the story paints them as irredeemable. I was really surprised that the redemption of SI's character was not the major plot point of the final parts of the book - this would seem natural to me. Instead, Jemisin seems to say that the Island has dissolved itself of the City and is a lost cause. Why would we connect a character who we know lives in an abusive household, who does long for more, who is nearly the victim of attempted rape in this story - does it track that our story would abandon this person? Is the message here that the programming this person has gone through is impossible to reverse? So much of Staten Island's fear, insecurity, and false facades ring true to rural, more conservative-leaning life. And yet, maybe because I know so many people like this, I don't believe that SI is a lost cause. Her father? Yes. Her? No. (hide spoiler)] [To add to the above, it seems really strange and totally out of nowhere that Jersey City suddenly appears as a new borough at the end of the story. I guess the commentary here is that what something says on a map doesn't matter, because a City is a concept more similar to a nation - a collection of thought and culture - rather than lines on a map (like a State). Fair enough, but it seemed to me more like the writer making a rapid adjustment to bring the book to a rapid close than something well thought out. (hide spoiler)] ( ) ThomasEB | Jul 4, 2024 |
The City We Became is an intensely political work of speculative fiction charting two distinct storylines, with both layers of the novel's narrative producing unexpected insights and parallels as they are superimposed atop one another. By blending concepts as diverse as the true nature of social constructs, what it takes for fictional stories to become “real,” and some of the more bewildering implications of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics, Jemisin manages to explore hidden dimensions of social existence and racism. In so doing, she dramatizes the cues and subtexts that underlie even the most outwardly mundane of everyday interactions into an intensely compelling science fiction story.... Initially straining to maintain and introduce its large cast of characters, The City We Became eventually becomes an allegory for the ways in which all types of bigotry quite literally “infect” the societies and subcultures they _target. The novel is in part an over-the-top adventure story whose characters engage in literal rap battles with two-dimensional spider-people, fight off a giant underground worm composed of discarded subway cars, and momentarily drive off parasitic alien sea anemones by throwing money at the problem until it goes away. However, behind all of that, this is also a novel about the horrifyingly absurd nature of bigotry, and the extent to which people are forced to accept as facts things that should not be true, but somehow are. IN 2018, N. K. Jemisin made genre history as the first author to win three consecutive Hugo Awards... Jemisin’s well-earned triumph was particularly notable given the fact that 2013 had seen the emergence of right-wing groups of predominantly white men, known as the “Sad Puppies” and “Rabid Puppies,” who until 2017 attempted to flood the Hugo nomination system with blocs of authors and texts they deemed appropriate. In light of the failure of this extended reactionary tantrum, Jemisin didn’t just win — her victories announced that science fiction and fantasy were, as she put it in her acceptance speech, “the aspirational drive of the zeitgeist” .... it’s difficult, now, to avoid the temptation to retroactively read into the novel the historic events that are transforming New York, along with so many other United States and global cities. The language of infestation, infection, and contagion seeps into Jemisin’s description of the Enemy’s invasion of New York, illuminating with terrifying insight the physical ecosystems by which a pathogen spreads through the city .... The City We Became estranges us from the everyday operations of power so that we can, with new clarity, see how it works and how it can be unraveled and remade; like her Hugo acceptance speech, the novel declares that the stakes of social power, the significance of asserting that the world belongs to the marginalized, is nothing less than epic. The basic premise, which was previewed in Jemisin’s 2016 story “The City Born Great”, is this: each great city reaches a point in its history when it literally comes alive and is embodied in an avatar who might otherwise seem an ordinary, undistinguished citizen. When this happens, ancient eldritch forces try to use this moment of instability to invade and gain a foothold in our world.... As a standalone narrative, The City We Became offers only a degree of closure in a rather abrupt ending, as Jemisin sets the stage for the epic struggles we can expect in subsequent volumes. As the inaugural volume of what promises to be a wildly original fantasy trilogy, quite unlike anything else Jemisin has written, it completely takes command of the very notion of urban fantasy, and it leaves us exactly where we need to be – wanting the next volume now. I’ve not read another book like this in years. Jemisin takes a concept that can be abstracted to the simplest of questions (What if cities were alive?) and wraps an adventure around it. That adventure takes center stage in the many scenes that read more like a superhero movie than a fantasy novel, such as when a towering Lovecraftian tentacle bursts from the river to destroy the Williamsburg Bridge. However, Jemisin’s most beautiful passages deliver attentive descriptions of New York’s melting pot of people. Her characters’ life experiences—racial, sexual, financial—bring perspectives that are deeply important to and often missing from contemporary literature, particularly in the fantasy genre. The City We Became is strange to read right now in a way that Jemisin — the only person ever to win the prestigious Hugo Award three years in a row — could not possibly have predicted. The infection in her fantasy New York City is a metaphor for colonialism and bigotry and white nationalism. Meanwhile, the real New York City, where I live, has become the center of America’s coronavirus pandemic, and the literal infection here is casting existing bigotry and white nationalism into ever-sharper relief. At times, it does feel as though coronavirus is threatening everything that makes New York a living, breathing, vital organism, and as though it will leave the city nothing but a husk of itself.... The City We Became is not a book about how New York falls apart. It’s a love letter to the city’s resilience, and to all the ways it overcomes hatred to rise up stronger than it was before. And by extension, it’s about the rest of us, and the ways in which we must all work together to protect and support one another. It will give you faith that New York can come back to itself again — and so can all the rest of us, too. Belongs to SeriesAwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
"Five New Yorkers must come together in order to save their city from destruction in the first book of a stunning new series by Hugo award-winning and NYT bestselling author N. K. Jemisin. Every great city has a soul. Some are ancient as myths, and others are as new and destructive as children. New York? She's got six. When a young man crosses the bridge into New York City, something changes. He doesn't remember who he is, where he's from, or even his own name. But he can feel the pulse of the city, can see its history, can access its magic. And he's not the only one. All across the boroughs, strange things are happening. Something is threatening to destroy the city and her six newborn avatars unless they can come together and stop it once and for all"-- No library descriptions found. |
LibraryThing AuthorN. K. Jemisin is a LibraryThing Author, an author who lists their personal library on LibraryThing. Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature American literature in English American fiction in English 2000-LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.94)
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Wikipedia in English
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