THE WORLD WE MAKE

In this follow-up to The City We Became (2020), the human avatars of New York City battle an extradimensional threat to the multiverse.

As New York attempts to persuade the other living cities of the world to join them in the fight for all humanity against R’lyeh, the alien city housing genocidal Lovecraft-ian horrors and represented by the sinister Woman in White, the city's avatars confront new challenges. Padmini, the avatar of Queens, faces deportation to India. Savvy city councilwoman Brooklyn campaigns for mayor against Sen. Panfilo, a xenophobic White man who promises to bring New York back to traditional values—he's secretly supported by the Woman in White and publicly defended by a band of violent skinheads. Manny is being pressured by his powerful family to abandon his role as Manhattan’s avatar and become the emerging city of Chicago’s primary avatar instead, a decision that would also mean abandoning New York’s primary avatar, Neek, with whom Manny is in love. Meanwhile, Aislyn, Staten Island’s avatar, discovers the downsides of turning her back on the rest of the city and allying herself with the Woman in White. As in the previous book, this is a fantasy inspired by the very real division between those who embrace difference (and are only intolerant of intolerance) and those who seek a creativity-killing homogeneity, seeing it as a return to a supposedly moral past that never existed. The story also explores how perceptions about a place imposed on it by outsiders—who have only the most distorted views about it from popular culture—can have genuinely damaging effects. It's cathartic to imagine fighting these slippery, inimical forces with magic, to believe for a moment that some complex problems have direct solutions—that passion, faith, and the will to fight can make miracles happen. Perhaps the possibility of confronting those problems head-on might serve as inspiration for all of us facing variants of this issue in the real world and help us model ourselves after Jemisin’s characterization of New Yorkers: tough, nasty, but ultimately kind people who defend their own while embracing newcomers into their midst.

A ray of hope in a dark time.