Travel Documents 117: The Great Cities Series
Genre: contemporary, urban fantasy, social change
The Dust Cover Copy
In Manhattan, a young grad student gets off the train and realizes he doesn't remember who he is, where he's from, or even his own name. But he can sense the beating heart of the city, see its history, and feel its power.
In the Bronx, a Lenape gallery director discovers strange graffiti scattered throughout the city, so beautiful and powerful it's as if the paint is literally calling to her.
In Brooklyn, a politician and mother finds she can hear the songs of her city, pulsing to the beat of her Louboutin heels.
And they're not the only ones.
Every great city has a soul. Some are ancient as myths, and others are as new and destructive as children. New York? She's got six.
The Scene
Worldbuilding
Technically, I’m breaking my own rules here by reviewing a contemporary urban fantasy instead of a near future work of some kind. But we need these stories right now. Badly. So I want to tell you about them.
The place is New York. But the story is about souls, not places. So this is about the soul of New York: its shine and its beat, its magic and its menace, its get to the point bluntness and its shirt off your back kindness. And in Jemisin’s hands, New York gleams in every facet, a place of power, potential, and bone deep magic.
And all of it is under an existential threat. There are forces that want New York to be less. Less weird. Less full of ‘strange people’. Less ‘dirty’. Less…human.
There’s a force using the nastiest xenophobic tendencies of humanity to gain power and a foothold. A force you’ll recognize if you’ve read Lovecraft. A thing with tentacles. And teeth.
The Crowd
Characterization
The story of the city and its struggle to be born as a soul is told through the seven people who make it up: Bronca, the done-with-your-shit LGBT Lenape soul of the Bronx. Manny, the politely smiling and deadly spirit of Manhattan, has a platinum debit card and a switch blade in his back pocket. Padmini, the driven grad student soul of Queens has one eye on her course work and one eye on her family in India. Brooklyn of Brooklyn, savvy and steady. Veneza is the mix-race soul of Jersey City, a woman with hope for tomorrow and a spring in her step. Neek is the heart of them all, wary and wild and sharp-edged, but with a delight to warm the world. And poor Aislyn embodies Staten Island in all its self-doubting and other-fearing quiet desperation.
Around them are all the colorful characters and wild people of New York: the guy who stops and helps you up when you pass out, reminding you to carry something for your bloodsugar. The granny who cusses as she reassures you and the woman who calls the cops on you because she doesn’t like ‘you people’ in the park. The jerk who thinks he needs to prove his self worth by attacking the weak. The community that stands for each other. The tired and the kind, the cruel and the brave, the patient and the in-your-face. Everyone, in short, you’d meet on a New York street.
Writing Style
With a back-beat style and a magical way with words, this series has a bit of song to it. I listened to the audiobook, and in that form the harmony of the words are accentuated. The story also has sound effects, which is just awesome. It’s a perfect fit for a story that is equal parts love letter to New York, indictment of the forces that try to force us into bland colonized well behaved boxes, and self-aware pulp movie adventure in the best sense of the moniker.
The Moves
Plot
Oh boy, is this work a wonderful rollercoaster of a plot. By seeing through seven pairs of eyes and seven points of view, you’re allowed all the confusion of dawning realizations, but you’re also able to enjoy the literary thrill of putting all the pieces together. By the middle of the second book, a lot of what you thought you knew gets tossed out and you have to rethink a lot of assumptions. And it is glorious!
The book is polarizing because it pulls no punches about solipsistic attitudes: people and things who want to ‘put people in their place’, who want everyone to be ‘nice’ and match their expectations and behave in a subservient manner if they get to survive at all, are the enemy. And a lot of the people acting that way in our current world are white. Jemisin calls that out, and that freaks a lot of white folks out. So yeah, there’s that.
I did have a couple moments in Book 2 of going ‘wait…what the…how does this work?’ but the next battle with Tentacles From Beyond fixed that. And oh man, would this series make good movies. There are so many cinematic scenes in here.
Overall Rating
A soaring song of soul and triumph with a boom-car backbeat, this series rocks the street!