The book is rich and generous in a way that belies the easy analogues of the plot. 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. 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. 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 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. Having overexerted himself in fighting off the Enemy, the city’s human avatar falls into a coma and vanishes.
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. But an Enemy lurks, ready to devour newborn cities on the cusp of coming into their power.
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. 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. 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.
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