When a Sinister Enemy Attacks New York, the City Fights Back

Fiction When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. THE CITY WE BECAME By N. K. Jemisin N.

K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, set on a distant planet prone to calamitous earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, made history twice over: in 2016, when she became the first African-American woman to win a Hugo Award for best novel (for the first in the series, “The Fifth Season”), and in 2018, when she became the first author to win a Hugo for every novel in a trilogy. After eight novels set on fantasy worlds, Jemisin has turned her sights to ours: Her latest book, “The City We Became,” unfolds in present-day New York City, with its crosstown bus delays, hot garbage reek and all its other mundane problems — plus one large, looming supernatural one. Spun off from Jemisin’s 2016 short story “The City Born Great,” the novel figures cities as living, sentient organisms that are “born” into human avatars, midwifed by the previous city to be delivered into sentience.

But an Enemy lurks, ready to devour newborn cities on the cusp of coming into their power. New York is embodied by a young queer black man living on the streets, and the Enemy infiltrates those most dangerous to him: the police. Having overexerted himself in fighting off the Enemy, the city’s human avatar falls into a coma and vanishes. In his absence, New York’s five boroughs stir into sentience and claim their own avatars, all of whom need to find one another to stamp out the Enemy’s infectious presence, wake the primary avatar and make the city whole.

I read “The City Born Great” with a mixture of admiration and alienation. I am not a New Yorker — I’m not even American — and while I loved the shape of the short story, its insights and structures, I was less engaged by a denouement that relied on familiarity with the city’s bridges and roadways for its effect. The story was wonderful, but it wasn’t for me, in a way that I couldn’t fault but also couldn’t quite overcome. So it’s with some gratitude that I found that “The City We Became,” while still a joyous love letter to New York, broadens from its origins and explicitly welcomes the foreignness of readers like me.

[ Read an excerpt from “The City We Became. ” ] Structurally, “The City We Became” is largely a sequence of fast-paced set pieces, a series of encounters with the Enemy, with each embodied borough discovering new powers as readers discover their histories and personalities. In quick succession, we’re introduced to Manhattan, a young black man who surfaces from Penn Station with no memory; Brooklyn, a black, middle-aged city councilwoman and former rapper; Bronca, a tough-as-nails queer Lenape woman in her 60s; Padmini Prakash, a South Asian graduate student repping Queens; and Aislyn Houlihan, a sheltered young white woman with an abusive racist cop for a father, standing for Staten Island. Each of them squares off against the Enemy — incarnated in a white woman of varying age and features, but always dressed in white — with mixed results.