The World We Make

July 1, 2022

Richard Sharpe returns to the mayhem of the early 19th-century Peninsular War in Cornwell's Sharpe's Command (75,000-copy first printing). Following the LJ-starred Big Girl, Small Town, Gallen's Factory Girls features a young woman in Northern Ireland working a grinding summer job made harder by a sleazy boss. In The World We Make, three-time Hugo Award--winning Jemisin returns to New York City, whose six protective avatars must work with the world's other great cities to waylay a populist mayoral candidate threatening the city's very soul (225,000-copy first printing). Following Kapelke-Dale's well-received debut, The Ballerinas, The Ingenue features a former piano prodigy Saskia Kreis, shocked to learn that her recently deceased mother left the family estate to a man with whom Saskia shares a painful past (200,000-copy first printing). In The Book of Everlasting Things, a debut from Delhi-based oral historian Malhotra, two lovers--perfumer's apprentice Samir, who is Hindu, and calligrapher's apprentice Firdaus, who is Muslim--are violently torn apart during India's Partition in 1947. From Silver Linings Playbook author Quick, We Are the Light limns the relationship between a sorrowing widower and an ostracized teenager. The multi-award-winning Rebecca Roanhorse returns with Tread of Angels, set in a late 1800s Colorado mining town where cardsharp Celeste defends a sister accused of murdering a Virtue, one of the town's ruling class. Having successfully entered the adult arena with A River Enchanted, YA author Ross wraps up her duology with A Fire Endless, set on a magical island whose uneasy balance of human and faerie is threatened by the power-hungry spirit of the North Wind (50,000-copy first printing). In debuter Swanson's Things We Found When the Water Went Down, a 16-year-old struggles to find her mother, a crusading environmentalist blamed for a miner's death who vanished in a blizzard. Of Apache/Chickasaw/Cherokee heritage, Wurth debuts with White Horse, featuring young, Indigenous Kari James, who inadvertently summons both her mother's ghost and a dangerous, blood-eyed creature when she discovers an old bracelet belonging to her mother (100,000-copy first printing). The pseudonymous Zeldis (Not Our Kind) brings together Beatrice, The Dressmaker of Prospect Heights, Brooklyn; her assistant, orphaned teenager Alice; and their newlywed neighbor Catherine, amid shifting relationships and secrets bubbling up from the past (50,000-copy first printing).

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September 15, 2022
This follow-up to 2020's The City We Became picks up where the that volume left off, with the various avatars of New York City and its boroughs settling into their new powers while maintaining a watchful eye on the alien city that almost destroyed them. The avatars discover that despite her dependence on Aislyn, the traitorous Staten Island avatar, the Woman in White has resumed her attack on the city via a xenophobic candidate for mayor, hoping to weaken it enough for her to resume her all-out assault. While Neek (the primary avatar of New York City) and the other borough avatars work to combat this new assault, Aislyn begins to have doubts about her alliance with her new ""friend"" as the alien city's presence begins to affect her family, her neighbors, and the borough itself. Jemisin brings her living-city saga to a satisfying conclusion, maintaining a sense of energy and excitement throughout, even as she sketches in more of the multiverse of multiverses underpinning her urban (in a more literal sense than usual) fantasy setting.

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September 19, 2022
Four-time Hugo Award winner Jemisin’s sequel to The City We Became loses some of the power of the first volume even as it continues to extol New York City’s diversity, history, and unusual kindness. Following the events of the first book, New York’s personified boroughs—minus Staten Island and plus the “honorary borough” of Jersey City—have learned how to control their city-based magic, but the invasive cosmic city of R’lyeh has its roots sunk into Staten Island and a Trumpian mayoral candidate preaching hate has the city’s avatars on edge. As the hate spreads, R’lyeh grows ever closer. Now the boroughs must cobble together an alliance once more and recruit the other cities of the world to help before R’lyeh wipes New York City off the map entirely. Jemisin embodies the spirit of the city in as lush and lively a voice as ever and does a masterful job incorporating even more history and magic. Where this falters is in the unchanging character dynamics, familiar narrative beats, and fight scenes that feel like retreads of those in book one. Still, readers looking for another underdog tale of human connection will be satisfied—though not blown away—by this series finale. Agent: Lucienne Diver, Knight Agency.

Starred review from March 1, 2023

Voice actor Robin Miles provides a masterful narration of Jemisin's sequel to The City We Became. As New York's boroughs--mostly unified after the first book's events--realize that the extradimensional threat to the multiverse isn't over, they try to convince other cities' avatars to join the battle. This means that in addition to giving voice to New York's accents and cultures, Miles must also narrate voices from other countries. She does so with aplomb. Miles's vocal range is staggering; she fully inhabits each character, channeling their emotions as they face sexism, racism, and all other manner of prejudices that the otherworldly threat can leverage. Miles communicates the complexity of Jemisin's characters, allowing their contradictions and struggles to come through. For instance, while it would be easy to make the xenophobic Staten Island into a mockery, Miles taps into the nuances of Jemisin's words, making Staten Island into someone who can be understood, if not condoned. VERDICT Listeners of the series' prior audiobook will already be clamoring for this one. Purchase multiple copies, and rest assured that patrons will be delighted.--Matthew Galloway

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from August 15, 2022
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.

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Starred review from October 1, 2022

Picking up where The City We Became left off, the avatars of the boroughs of New York City are locked in a war of puppets and subterfuge with the Lovecraftian horror of The Woman in White and their own rogue Staten Island. The Enemy has been operating in the shadows, and New York will be her masterpiece of destruction. But New York and New Yorkers have always adapted to change and have never given in to anyone. R'yleh sends in her agents of bureaucracy and bland mediocrity, and New York tells them to get stuffed--until the Queen of Queens figures out what it's really all about and convinces the Great Old Ones they have been their own worst enemy all along. This is urban fantasy where the city itself is both the band of adventurers and the setting where the adventures happen. VERDICT Highly recommended for readers who loved the deep dive into myth and roots of American Gods by Neil Gaiman, those fascinated with conspiracy theories about politics and corruption, and anyone who loves a good adventure where plucky underdogs rise up and triumph in spite of themselves.--Marlene Harris

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.