357 pages
Published 2022
Read from September 7 to September 11
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
I’d been avoiding this book, consciously or not, for a while. The first book in this duology, The City We Became, was one of my favorite books of all time. I read it early in the pandemic, shortly after libraries had opened back up, but when the species-level trauma we were experiencing was still strange and new. I found myself unwilling to read the follow-up volume in part because of those associations, both with that period of time and with the person I cohabitated with back then. And looming over everything was the apocalyptic realization that Jemisin sums up in her acknowledgements: “The New York I wrote about in the first book of this series no longer exists.” COVID has forever altered the urban social landscape. The eldritch horrors of fascism and white supremacy have exploded outward in all directions, throwing tentacles into every area of life. As Jemisin goes on to say: “I realized my creative energy was fading under the onslaught of reality.”
I also avoided World because I knew I’d be crying. A lot.
I was already crying in the prologue, not because anything had happened in the narrative but because of the ache and fierce love Jemisin weaves into her description of that old, already passed away NYC. By no means can I claim to have ever been a New Yorker, but I spent enough time orbiting the city, dipping the occasional toe into its momentum, marching in protests and slipping through museums and attending basement concerts, that I feel that same love in my chest. “I need the sidewalks rising to meet my feet the way bodega cats lift their asses when you knuckle near their tales,” narrates Neek, the newly chosen avatar of the city. That was enough to spring my waterworks; it didn’t abate much from there.
Cities are the apotheosis of our species: diverse, energetic, creative, an ecology of thought and life and love, a collective that is more than the sum of individuals. Xenophobia, Christian nationalism, white supremacy, fascism — these spew rage at cities because they hate what it means to be truly and fully human. It makes all too much sense that any eldritch horror bent on killing the heart of a city would weaponize gentrification and real estate speculation. Hell, looking at the world in 2023, is any of this even fantasy anymore? (Maybe the tentacles are still fantasy, but considering the Republican party, I’m not so sure anymore.)
If any aspect of this book could be said to be a step down from The City We Became, it’s the pacing. What seem to be pivotal twists or setbacks get resolved by the end of each chapter. Each borough avatar faces a crisis and solves it, chapter after chapter. This isn’t that different from the structure of the first book, looking back on it, but it feels slightly creakier this time around. It feels a bit like a string of vignettes rather than a cohesive novel. And before you realize it, suddenly it’s the runup to the finale.
All that aside, there's nothing wrong with a book where the good guys keep winning and we get to hang out with some cool characters — the forces of good face enough setbacks in the real world as it is. It's always a fuck-yeah moment when the City flexes its power over some white supremacist shitheads. The real world needs way more of this energy. That need, in the end, is what made this book so hard to read with a dry eye.
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