I know you know, because I tell everyone, that I love my state. I love it with a deep and visceral love. I almost weep with joy at the loamy smell of the Northeast woodlands and the salt/tar/sugar/suntan lotion air of our much-maligned Shore. I love the hot burning smell of asphalt on summer days, the scent of wet snow about to bury us in the winter, the warm autumn days and the clarity of the air on autumn nights, the green of spring for a month before flowers show up. I love the traffic, the vulgarity of the people, the diversity, the everything.  

The thing is…I’m not alone. Our closest friends feel the same way. Sometimes, we’re stuck in traffic caused by poorly planned construction or at a Hungarian festival, eating sausages made by some old lady sold out of a cooler and we’re full of glee at the New Jerseyness of it all. We’ve all talked for years about how deeply rooted we are in this place, how much we honor our genus loci; the loud, dirty, impossibly beautiful place we live in and which is part of us.

The moment I opened up N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became, I felt that this was a book about those of us who love a place so deeply, so viscerally, that everything beautiful and awful about that place become a beacon of existence for them.

A man stumbles off the train to find he has lost who he was and has become, beyond belief, part of a city. An artist whose ancestry is traced back to the first people on the land and to many of the people that colonized that land after, a musician turned politician, a homeless person and a unloved woman find themselves drawn inexorably into an ancient battle as part of a Lovecraftian paean to New York City.  I didn’t want this book to end and I’m so very glad that there will be a sequel.

I loved this book. It’s angry and it’s hateful and it’s gorgeous and it’s beautiful and it is real. I do not doubt for a second that there are avatars of places, because as I said above…I know people whose roots run deeper than the sewer systems of their cities.

If you like MURCIÉLAGO, you will very probably like this book for many of the same reasons – eldritch horror, queer characters, creeping paranormality. This book also has characters you will believe in and root for, sometimes even when the decisions they make are the wrong ones for the worst reasons. They are immensely well-conceived characters and well-written. I can tell you nothing about them that wouldn’t be a spoiler. ^_^

Ratings:

Characters – 9
Story – 10
Queerness – 9

Overall – 10

This novel had the perfect climactic scene. Made me sit up and say, “Fuck, yeah…!”