The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin

Orbit, 448 pages, $28

Not a mystery.

If you’re from Staten Island, maybe don’t read this book. Just jokin’, y’all. Mostly.

N. K. Jemisin is still riding high off her award-winning Broken Earth series. It’s hard to pigeon-hole both that series and this book as “science fiction,” but they certainly aren’t of this world! Having said that, “The City We Became” is about New York City, as real as the real New York City, but with a parallel universe overlay. And squidgy, flaccid monsters. And people as themselves but also as the human manifestations of the boroughs of New York. I know, that’s a lot to absorb as a premise.

A strange force has launched an attack on New York City. It’s mostly a psychic attack, since regular people can’t see the wormy or feathery tendrils that burrow into their bodies, but the people-boroughs can. Most big cities in the world have periodic incarnations as people. Birth or rebirth, it’s called. Cities help each other with the rebirth. It’s not a frequent event, but it occurs to battle sublimation, degeneration, disintegration of the city. Not all cities survive the rebirth; e.g., Atlantis. (I know, whoa!, right?)

In the case of New York, there are five avatars for the five boroughs, plus one who represents all of New York City. The trick, of course, is to get all these newly awakened avatars together to defeat the enemy. Before becoming avatars, the people were mostly just ordinary people. Several are young or young-ish, one is old, a couple are white, one is Latinx, one is Lenape, one is black, one is a mash-up, some are cheerful or cheerful-ish, one is damn grumpy. Most are born and bred New Yorkers, but one — Manhattan — is newly arrived to the city. Moreover, Manhattan does not remember his original identity. The five + one are truly an agglomeration of those who comprise New York City.

Jemisin doesn’t just mix up the phenotypes, she mixes humor with drama with adventure with philosophizing with science with what I can only assume are insider New York observations. The story is pretty straightforward — for a jiggly storyline, that is — but Jemisin packs a whole lot into it. Even if you didn’t know, you probably would guess that she is a born and bred New Yorker herself. You’d be wrong. She was born in Iowa City. But she has lived in NYC off and on for many years.

Her books are inventive and out-of-the-box. Her main thesis in her latest works is that worlds are organisms. Life cannot be defined solely in human terms. Supernatural merely means above our understanding of how the universe works. “The City We Became” has an element of superhero as well. If you have seen “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” that would be good preparation for this book.

Sassy, saucy, serious, substantial, subway-ish, surprising, and ancient. You can’t go into reading this with expectations or preconceptions. It’s a “hell, yeah, girl” kind of book.

This is labeled as book one of a trilogy.