N.K. Jemisin’s Great Cities Duology, which began with The City We Became and concludes with The World We Make, is a masterpiece of speculative fiction from one of the most important writers of her generation. Of course, if cities come to life, there must be someone trying to stop that. And there is. The World We Make is the second in Jemisin’s Great Cities series. In the first book, The City We Became, New York City actually wakes up and immediately has to fight for its life against the Woman in White, herself an avatar of an interdimensional city. In The World We Make, a city’s soul is represented by an individual resident who becomes its avatar. New York City has an avatar, as does each of its five boroughs (and Jersey City, an honorary sixth borough). The avatars embody New York in all its multicultural glory, representing a wide spectrum of gender, race, religion, ethnic and linguistic origin, sexual orientation, political engagement, domicile, education, and class positions—a rebuke to the many stories about NYC that erase people of color. Insisting on a monochromatic story, however, is The Woman In White, the avatar of R’lyeh, an extra-dimensional city invading our world. R’lyeh is one of H. P. Lovecraft’s most famous creations, a lost city housing a demon seeking to obliterate humankind. Phantasmagoric battles are waged between the avatars and regular New Yorkers on one side and The Woman In White and her legions of monsters on the other. Lastly, while I love LGBTQ characters getting the attention they should have always had, this deserves to be done well. While many other authors do this justice (as per my review of the prior installment) Jemisin just doesn't. The obsession with sexual orientation of all the protagonists is just odd. It doesn't add anything to the story, in my opinion. The World We Make is the second and final installment of the Great Cities duology, a gloriously weird SFF story of a group of seemingly random New Yorkers slammed together as they are transformed into the living avatars of their multifarious city just in time to fight for their very survival.

Four-time Hugo Award-winning and New York Timesbestselling author N.K. Jemisin craftsa glorious taleof identity,resistance, magic andmyth. It's a glorious fantasy, set in that most imaginary of cities, New York. It's inclusive in all the best ways, and manages to contain both Borges and Lovecraft in its fabric, but the unique voice and viewpoint are Jemisin's alone." ― Neil Gaiman

In all seriousness, I bow down in awe of N.K. Jemisin's genius, and will read anything and everything she writes forevermore. She is an auto-buy author for me, and I haven't been disappointed yet! Third, the story has numerous holes that are glaring and galling. How come Manny's family knows about Cities? Why do the Proud Men disrupt the court proceedings? What happens to the passengers that went overboard during the ferry episode? How do cities communicate with each other? Why is there such discrepancy between campaign financing scrutiny on the two sides of the mayoral race? Every great city has a soul. A human avatar that embodies their city's heart and wields its magic. New York? She's got six. New York City tries hard to deal with the Woman in White on their own but eventually, two things become clear. The first is that they can’t do it on their own. The second is that it is definitely not just “their problem”. If the other cities cannot get over their elitism and listen then the whole world is in danger. This is the second and final book in N. K. Jemisin’s Great Cities Duology that combines urban fantasy, science fiction, politics, and horror.

Four-time Hugo Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author N.K. Jemisin crafts a glorious tale of identity, resistance, magic and myth. The City We Becameis a raucous delight, a joyride, a call-to-arms, a revolution with plenty of dancing. Eat your heart out, Lovecraft." ― Alix E. Harrow, author of The Ten Thousand Doors of January

Every great city has a soul. A human avatar that embodies their city's heart and wields its magic. New York? She's got six. But all is not well in the city that never sleeps.’ the worldbuilding might not be completely fleshed out or entirely self-consistent, e.g. it's safe to say that Manhattan's subplot comes out of *almost* nowhere and is resolved incorrectly. New York City isn’t the only sentient city in The World We Make. All the large cities of the world (except American cities for reasons that eventually are revealed) have avatars. The older cities form a cantankerous, stubborn oversight committee of sorts that sort of governs the sentient cities. They have a system where the previous youngest city mentors the current youngest city. This way the old cranky cities don’t have to deal with young avatars as they learn the ins and outs of being a sentient city. The older cities really don’t like being bothered by the younger cities. When New York City tries to ask for help because the enemy is still harassing them, the old cities basically say “your problem, leave us alone”. An interconnected world So, in The World We Make exactly what we just talked about happens. When a city becomes so well defined and has special enough characteristics, has a personality if you will, it comes to life. Now, this doesn’t mean that the light poles start dancing and the sidewalk starts shifting around. In The World We Make it means that a human (or more than one, depending on the city) becomes an avatar for the city.

This tonal change allows the reader more access to the character, allowing us to know Neek in a way he won’t allow the others to know him. In a way, this second novel is all about deepening our understanding of these characters, who they are, and who their boroughs are. After all, thoughts are also energy. Our bodies make electricity and those electrical impulses in our brains create our thoughts. So could our thoughts become real? What if enough people have the same thoughts? Could that much energy become an actual thing? N.K. Jemisin takes that premise and goes further. Could enough thoughts and feelings about a city bring it to life? Can a city have a soul? Find out in The World We Make.It does require an open mind to accept the idea of cities eventually having enough energy to become alive. But it’s a very interesting concept that was very fun to explore and ruminate on. I keep thinking about who my city’s avatar would be and what exactly they would be like. Read The World We Make and contemplate your own city’s personality. But the battle from book one isn’t done. The enemy, appearing to the avatars as a Woman in White, is still there, and she’s gaining power. Can New York survive? Will other awakened cities agree to help? And what if she’s not the only foe they must fear? My thanks to Little, Brown Book Group U.K./Orbit for an eARC via NetGalley of ‘The World We Make’ by N. K. Jemisin. The World We Make focuses on the newly born city of New York City. With all its different boroughs, seven different avatars were chosen: The Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Jersey City, Staten Island, Queens, and NYC itself. Of these seven, six come together to protect New York, and one, Staten Island, breaks away and sequesters herself on her island. Initially, this seems unimportant to the other avatars but eventually, it becomes a much bigger problem. Fighting to exist in The World We Make