If you love New York City, as I do, you’ll love this book as much as I did (my favorite read of 2022 so far by far).
Let’s just start there.
Like author N.K. Jemisin, I’m an NYC transplant, even if she had more experience visiting it in her youth than I did. Like her, I came with an understanding and expectation of what I thought the city was and was going to be for me. And, according to the afterword, I learned and changed as I learned the city itself.
Jemisin just gets it. In turning the boroughs into “characters”, she loads them and their contexts with enough social narrative to make them feel alive the way the five feel alive to us who live in them. The up-by-her-boostraps lyrical and powerful Brooklyn, the stylish and handsome Manhattan, the fiercely independent and artistic indigenous Bronx, the intelligent immigrant Queens, and the white/ignored/bigoted Staten Island.
The Lovecraftian struggle here is very much a funhouse mirror version of those who struggle to keep New York City from the clutches of real estate lords and power barons. The city that’s being built on the city is a perfect metaphor for what happens every day. The fight for her character is a fight that all of us in the working/creative classes respectively are tasked with.
A few things kept this from being a perfect read: some of the characterizations are a little too on-the-nose. The ending is a bit too Marvel-esque. And I think this works much better as a standalone than the first of a trilogy.
But still, this is an excellent book about the city we love. I encourage you to read it.
