The City We Became

(by N.K. Jemisin)

I like the premise of this one a lot: at a certain point in their development, cities in our world become living entities, but a creepy af Lovecraftian city from another dimension would prefer for that not to happen, because those living cities in our world get in the way of that other city’s plans for its own expansion. When cities in our world come alive, they have human avatars—it’s usually one per city, but New York has a “primary” avatar for the city as a whole, plus an avatar for each of the five boroughs. And when the book opens, New York is on the verge of coming alive and the avatars are finding out who/what they are and who/what they are up against.

The sheer New York-ness of this book combined with the creepiness of the antagonist is what made it such a fun read for me: I like the way the action moves across the city, and I like the way each avatar represents each borough, and I like the conflict between the city’s avatars and the other city’s “squamous eldritch bullshit,” to borrow a phrase used by two of the avatars at different points in the narrative. I like how the avatars figure out what they’re capable of and what they need to do basically by feeling things out as they go (though they do have São Paulo as a mentor: it’s the job of the youngest living city to go help out at the birth of the next one). And I like that the city’s primary avatar is a street artist whose art is part of what helps bring the city to life.