Part Of It

I have hated this city. I have loved this city. I will fight for this city until it won’t have me anymore. This is my homage to the city. Hope I got it right.

Every great city has a soul, and New York's is being born. Across the boroughs, New Yorkers are finding themselves connected with the City. Manhattan, a grad student arriving for school; Brooklyn, a local politician; Bronx, a gallery artist. But they're not alone. Something is attacking New York, and these are only the boroughs. They need to find each other, and the main New York, before a cosmic threat takes out the city they know far too well.

These books are a love letter to New York City. At least, I assume so. I've never been and, outside of the latest mayoral race, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the goings-on of the city. As a result, many of the personal references are lost on me, but this duology was still very successful at what it was trying to do.

I really fell in love with the first book. I'm a sucker for a good setting, and The City We Became made New York feel alive. But more importantly than that, I was drawn to the characters. Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx in particular really got to me, but all of the Boroughs were compelling in their own ways. Occasionally their characterization would lean a bit too hard on, "well, you know New York!" — which, no, I don't — but overall I liked to see how they embodied the city and how the city embodied them.

The sense of humor was also excellent. The author did a good job of utilizing the slightly-absurd situation these sarcastic and strong-personality characters are in to balance more serious commentary.

While I did love the first book, my biggest complaint was that sometimes the point was a bit on the nose. The strongest points of The City We Became were in the storytelling, not when the author was bending over backwards to make a point. And they were always points I agreed with, so it's not that I didn't like that they were involved at all. I just didn't like the moments where it seemed like the author would stop to look at me, making sure I was keeping up. Yes, I understand it, and I think every bit of showing was done excellently, so I wanted that exclusively throughout.

“I am only what you made me.”

I was able to pick up the second book immediately, so I dove in, eagerly awaiting to see if it would stick the landing. And ... kind of.

It's not that the second book is bad. Quite the contrary; I really liked it. It was 3.5 stars to the first book's 4 stars. At the end of the day, this is a book where I was able to look past the flaws and enjoy it. Unfortunately, though, I am someone who thinks about the books I read pretty hard, and The World We Make just didn't hold up as well.

In the acknowledgements, the author admits that this was originally meant to be a trilogy until life got in the way, and then (in an effort to finish it at all), it was turned into a duology. And the main problem with The World We Make is that you can absolutely tell. The beginning showed a lot of promise, but the ending proved that this story needed more space to be developed properly.

Major, lore-breaking issues are brought up that are resolved in the wrong POV or entirely off the page. We end up shrugging away a lot of the conflicts, leaving us with a deeply unsatisfying ending. A subplot that is drawn out almost entirely across both books is resolved in one conversation. But the biggest crime was that New York himself takes a backseat to the entire thing. There was an obvious, desperate need for a third book.

But, all that being said, I still enjoyed this series. I liked the writing, the sense of humor and the goofy solutions these characters find for their problems, and the setting. When this duology was good, it was really good. It's a tragedy to me that it floundered so much at the end when it has a lot of potential. If the author ever decides to revisit this universe, I'll be there eagerly waiting.

And for a little while, in the wake of all this, it feels like everything’s going to be okay.