"The World We Make" by N.K. Jemisin

In my review of The City We Became, the first book in this duology, I noted my mixed feelings about Jemisin centering her newest series as a "love letter to New York." And I use that phrase with all the cliched baggage it carries with it. After all, New York City is special, and the people there know it, but for all the rest of us... it can get a little much. 

Jemisin's unwavering adulation of New York leads to similar problems in The City We Become, where the main villain is trying to destroy NYC by drumming up outside hatred for the city. This makes the conflict explicitly NYC vs. everyone else, where NYC is a beautiful mix of confident, take-no-crap cultures, ethnicities, and races and "everyone else" is ignorant racists. Don't get me wrong--white suburbanites especially deserve most of the criticism they get, but in this novel the dichotomy seems overly straightforward, and even blind to the many cultures and beliefs that exist outside NYC. 

Jemisin noted that this series was originally intended to be a trilogy that she condensed into a duology, and I think that truncated nature shows, particularly in the book's resolution. Though I finished the book just a couple weeks ago, I have entirely forgot the ending, but I'm pretty sure New York won. (just kidding, I know it did)

Still, like with her previous book, Jemisin always writes fun and engaging prose, even though almost everything the characters said annoyed me. The relationship between Manhattan and Neek (the avatar of NYC as a whole) was more sweet than I expected.