lightreads

The World We Make

3/5. Second volume in this duology about New York City coming alive through its human avatars, and the interdimensional tentacled horrors that want to see it die.

A bit of a comedown from the first book, TBH. This is still energetic and magical in that big, colorful urban fantasy way. It’s also extremely on the nose. Like, a race for Mayor of NYC where the bad guy’s slogan is “make New York great again” on the nose. I suspect that’s going to be pretty divisive.

It’s a mixed bag, in general. Speaking to my idiosyncratic tastes, it’s a plus that Robin Miles is having a truly fantastic time reading the audio. And a minus that this book features a race for NYC mayor, and I have intimate professional knowledge of *counts on fingers* four NYC mayoral campaigns and uh. That is not how that works. At all.

And fundamentally, the greatest strength of these books is its greatest weakness: the premise is that these avatars embody the essence of the living city. So they can both be delightfully stereotypical and reductively stereotypical, sometimes in the same sentence. See the conflicted white lady avatar of Staten Island chanting “not in my back yard” to cast protective magic. Also see: on the nose.

The Stone Sky

3/5. Conclusion to this well-decorated trilogy about the earth periodically destroyed from within and the people enslaved to stop it.

This was a little anticlimactic, even as it . . . climaxed and did all of the (mostly wrenching) things I was expecting it to do. I think it's that phenomenon where finally providing the science-fantasy explanation for WTF has been apocalyptically happening sort of . . . undercuts the wonder/horror of it.

But. But this is still thematically lovely, and painful, with interlocked adult/child, slaver/enslaved pairings that shift configuration in unexpected ways. And fundamentally this book is wrestling with some of the basic questions I see my friends wrestling with in a different context: when you live inside an unjust system, is it better to push for change or burn it all down? Better for whom? This trilogy's answers were what I thought they would be, though of course the road to get there, and all its complications, is the point.

Also, for those who care about these things, yes, there is ultimately a Watsonian explanation for the use of the second person POV. It's not just a random structural choice Jemisin made (I mean, it's really not random anyway, it's doing some important load-bearing, but you know what I mean).

The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth)

4/5. First in a . . . trilogy? About a land periodically destroyed by earthquake and resulting volcanoes, and the population that barely clings to life on it, and the few with the power to control seismic activity who are feared and enslaved for their gifts.

Excellent, depressing as hell. I was never more than lukewarm on the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms trilogy. You know, those books that broke Jemisin's career open, and that it seemed compulsory to rave about for a few years there. Interesting, but never got me there, was my verdict.

This, though. It's another iteration of enslaved gods, in a way, but this one is tighter, meaner. Thematically, this book is all criss-crossed parent/child pairs of many sorts, actual and metaphorical. It's one of those books that centers women's stories without being about mothering, specifically, if you get me. It's clever and awful and compelling.

Points of interest: Queerness of several varieties, including genderqueerness and polyamory, are represented as part of the fabric of this story, without being particularly remarked upon.

Content notes: Various sorts of child harm, including infanticide by parent and . . . many other horrible things, come to think of it.