I read The Fifth Season a couple years ago, and confess I haven’t read the rest of that trilogy, even though I loved the first book. I’ve just had a problem lately with starting series and not finishing them and it has absolutely nothing to do with how much I enjoyed the first book. It’s simply a matter of too many books and too little time.
It probably doesn’t help that I have hard copies of the Broken Earth trilogy, which makes me feel like I have to read them instead of listening to them on audio, which would give me a better chance of finishing them, since I have much more time for listening than for reading.
In any case, this new book by N.K. Jemisin has reminded me how brilliant she is and motivated me to finish her series – and read her Inheritance Trilogy, which has been sitting on my kindle for a few years now.
This book is about New York City, and I feel I should admit that I’ve only visited New York once as a teenager, so I’m sure there are a lot of references here that I’m just not getting, although Jemisin does a good job of explaining things so non-New Yorkers don’t feel too left out. I have to admit, though, I do not understand what it is about New Yorkers and their city. I mean, I love Chicago, but the love New Yorkers feel for their city seems to go above and beyond what anyone else ever feels for their home town and I just don’t get it.
The book starts out with a prologue told in first person from the perspective of a homeless black man and I just now realized that it’s the only chapter in this book that’s written in first person. The rest of the book is told in third person limited with the perspective shifting between different characters.
I also just realized why the avatar of New York is homeless. At first, I thought it was just Jemisin trying to be super inclusive, to show that the people we most overlook and underestimate can end up being the most significant and powerful people. While I’m sure that was part of it, later in the book she talks about the significance of home. When an avatar goes home after becoming the avatar of their borough, that place is protected from the Enemy in a way that the rest of their borough is not. But since the avatar of New York is homeless, the entire city is his home, making him the perfect avatar.
I don’t think we ever get his name. When the narration shifts to third person limited from the perspective of his friend, Paulo, he’s referred to as the avatar. As it turns out, New York City is in the process of being born, and when a city is born, it chooses an inhabitant of the city as its avatar and that person becomes the city. They are the city. So after the birth, the avatar becomes known as New York because he encompasses all of the city.
And each time a city is born, there’s something known as the Enemy that is intent on destroying the city, and New York knows he has to fight to protect his home. He wages an epic battle against the Enemy on the Williamsburg Bridge, and although he wins the battle, the war is not over. The Enemy is defeated, but not dead, and the battle took so much out of New York that he slips into a coma.
But there’s more than just one avatar for the city of New York – apparently that’s not the case for every city, but in the case of New York, in addition to one avatar to be the living embodiment of the city, there is also an avatar for each borough.
First, we meet Manny, who has just arrived in New York for the very first time and promptly loses all of his memories. He can’t remember who he is or even his name. When someone asks him his name, he says Manny, not telling them that it’s short for Manhattan.
People mention throughout the book that Manny is clearly mixed race and it’s kind of hard for them to put him in a box. We never know his heritage because even Manny himself can’t remember. He can pass for Latino, making the name Manny plausible, but he knows that isn’t quite right, even if he can’t remember what is right.
Manny collapses a couple times upon entering the city of New York for the first time, partly as a result of becoming the borough of Manhattan, but also probably because he just happens to arrive at the same time the avatar of New York is waging his battle against the Enemy on the Williamsburg Bridge, and although he does not know any of this, Manny can sense it.
Fortunately, Manny is helped by some good Samaritans before hitching a ride on an old-fashioned checker cab that is intended to be booked for weddings and events and not an actual cab, but Manny acts on instinct and climbs in the cab like he knows what he’s doing (as New Yorkers are wont to do) and is lucky that the driver, Madison, is willing to take him into the borough of Manhattan.
Along the way, they encounter white tendrils everywhere, sticking up out of the ground and growing like weeds. When they get on FDR, an entire lane is blocked off by a huge white thingy. Manny and Madison appear to be the only ones who can see it, and although it’s obvious that Manny can see it because he’s an avatar, it’s unclear how Madison is able to see them. Maybe because of her proximity to Manny? Despite the fact that other drivers can’t see the obstruction, they all try to go around it anyway, as though they sense something there. Those who get too close develop white tendrils growing off of them and their cars, as though they’ve been infected.
Acting on instinct, Manny borrows an umbrella from Madison and rides the top of her cab while he has her drive straight through the white thing, thereby punching an umbrella-shaped hole in it, which defeats it and causes all the white tendrils growing on the other drivers to vanish.
Afterwards, Manny manages to meet up with his roommate and his new apartment, but when they go for a walk in Central Park, they get stopped by an older white woman who has white tendrils growing out of the back of her head and berates them for shamelessly flaunting their sin in a public place, calls the police, and records Manny and his roommate on her phone until the police arrive. I’m not sure what she thinks they’ve done wrong. Not only is being gay legal, but Manny and his roommate were just walking side by side. I don’t think they were even touching. Yes, they’re both gay, but not for each other. Whether they might have developed feelings for each other if Manny hadn’t had to go off and save New York, we’ll never know.
In any case, the white tendrils (which Manny’s roommate can also, inexplicably see, lending credence to my theory that proximity to Manny allows anyone to see them) come back and start to close in on Manny and his roommate. They climb on top of a rock, but the white tendrils grow too quickly. Manny, acting on instinct again, throws money at them, and finds that makes them disappear. Making the connection between Manhattan and money, he throws all the money he and his roommate have in their pockets before a black woman marches up playing music on her phone, which blasts away all the white tendrils, including those infecting the judgey white woman, who leaves without making any more trouble. The black woman turns out to be none other than Brooklyn.
Brooklyn once had a career as a rapper who went by MC Free, but has since left that behind and is now a lawyer and city councilwoman for the borough of Brooklyn. She showed up in the nick of time because she sensed Manny as a fellow avatar and sensed that he was in danger. As soon as she’s finished explaining all of this, they both sense the development of Queens as an avatar and the fact that she, too, is under attack, so they head to Queens.
Queens is a young woman from India who is in New York under a student visa. She loves math and is a regular math whiz, but it’s hard to find a job having only studied math, and her residency in the country is contingent upon her being able to find a job after graduation, so she’s studying finances.
She’s studying (or trying to study) in her room, watching two young boys play in her neighbor’s pool when she notices something strange happening underneath the surface of the water and instinctively understands that the two boys are in danger. She runs out of her room and down the stairs to try to help them, but she knows she won’t get their in time, so she uses math to bend space and time to move through the walls of her house, rather than around them. She pulls one boy out of the water in time, but while she’s doing that, the thing in the pool manages to grab hold of the other boy. They get in a tug of war match, which Queens ends up winning.
Only after that do Manny and Brooklyn show up.
So they’re late, but they explain what’s going on (as best they can) and decide to go back to Brooklyn’s brownstone for the night before moving on to help Bronca.
Brooklyn actually owns two brownstones – one she lives in and one she rents out. She decides to stay with her guests in the house she usually rents out, but in doing so, she marks the rental house as her home, leaving her father and daughter vulnerable to attack in the other house. Once she realizes her mistake, Brooklyn dashes over to the other house, freestyling rap lyrics as she goes because that is her super power that she can use to banish the Enemy. She succeeds in banishing the Enemy from all of Brooklyn, but it takes a lot out of her and she’s pretty wiped for most of the rest of the book, and even then, the battle isn’t over.
The next day her father calls her in a panic because they received some letters that they’re getting evicted because she owes so much in back taxes on the place that it has been sold to someone else: a company called the Better New York Foundation.
Fortunately, Brooklyn is well connected and promptly gets her lawyers to put an injunction on the eviction order until they can get a chance to investigate what’s really going on.
Bronx is an older Native American woman of the Lenape tribe who goes by Bronca. She works at an art gallery and is busy fighting with her coworkers when she’s not fighting with bigots and the board members of the art gallery who want her to sell the gallery’s soul in exchange for the largest check Bronca has ever seen from an organization called the Better New York Foundation.
When Bronca becomes the avatar of the Bronx, she knows exactly what’s happening. In addition to being the oldest of all the avatars, she also ends up the only one blessed with all the knowledge of what it means for a city to be born, what the process looks like, and what the challenges are. Unlike most of the other avatars, Bronca has absolutely no interest in joining forces. The way she sees it, the other boroughs have never helped the Bronx, so why should the Bronx help them?
But the fight comes to her door when the Woman in White shows up. The Woman in White is a personification of the Enemy, and although she’s always a white woman dressed in all white with white hair, she takes on slightly different forms. When she approaches Bronca, she looks like a corporate bigwig. When she approaches Aislyn (the avatar of Staten Island) she reminds me more of Dolores Umbridge.
So Bronca ends up having to fight the Woman in White on her own, and she kicks her ass, but again, she’s not gone for good and Bronca is wiped, not least because she hasn’t had a full night’s sleep in two or three days.
When Manny, Queens, and Brooklyn show up, Bronca wants nothing to do with them, and Brooklyn doesn’t appear to be too keen on the idea of working with her, either. Bronca is a lesbian, and in her days as MC Free, Brooklyn spouted much of the same homophobic slurs as her male competitors and Bronca still resents her for it, even though it’s been years and Brooklyn has long since apologized for it.
They manage to come to an uneasy sort of agreement just in time for Hong Kong to show up with São Paulo, who got knocked on his ass by Aislyn, the avatar of Staten Island. He had gone to try to explain to her what was happening and get her into the city with the other avatars, but Aislyn lives with her mother and bigoted father who has taught her to distrust the city and anyone not like them (white and preferably Irish).
So not only does Paulo’s physical appearance make Aislyn distrust him, but because she’s an avatar, she can sense that he’s not of Staten Island. His timing also sucks because she has just gotten into an altercation with her misogynistic father’s friend and house guest, Conall. Fortunately, she was able to use her power to blow him through a fence, and she knows Conall won’t tell her father what really happened because he could never admit that a woman could do such a thing to him. Nevertheless, she’s still shaken by the incident and the knowledge that her father would welcome such a despicable creature into their home. And an Hispanic man, whom she can sense does not belong, in the middle of her street is exactly what she does not want to encounter right now. So she blows him all the way off her island.
Fortunately, Hong manages to find Paulo and bring him to the Bronx, where he explains everything to the avatars of the other boroughs while Paulo recovers.
The Woman in White wants to destroy New York before it can have a chance to really come into its own because every time a city is born, it destroys whole other universes, which she understandably wants to stop. But it’s the survival of her universes against the survival of ours. May the best universe win.
And the Woman in White is playing dirty. She started the Better New York foundation and it’s not new. It is an international organization that has its fingers in development projects all over the world, ready to attack any avatar of a city as soon as that city is born.
So Paulo had come to help New York through the birthing process because it is the job of the youngest city to help the next city, but the most recent births haven’t been going the same way the earlier births went. After São Paulo was the birth of New Orleans, which died when the avatar was shot to death, resulting in Hurricane Katrina flooding the city. Then there was supposed to be the birth of Port-au-Prince, but that city was also stillborn, resulting in the hurricane that almost wiped out the entire island. Paulo had apparently been trying to warn Hong and the other older cities that something was going wrong with the births of these new cities, but they wouldn’t listen. It’s not until Hong sees for himself what’s going on that he realizes Paulo was not exaggerating.
So they split up. Manny heads to an abandoned subway station underneath City Hall to see if he can wake New York, or at least protect him from whatever is coming next, since Manny can sense that that’s his job. He doesn’t have a car, but fortunately Madison shows up in her checkered cab again and is again miraculously able and willing to take him just where he needs to go.
Everyone else hops in Bronca’s car to go convince Staten Island to join them, but they’re really not good at persuading people, and the Woman in White has already dug her claws too deeply into Staten Island to be booted now. She looks exactly like the kind of person Aislyn has been raised to trust and all the other avatars look exactly like the kind of people she has been raised to distrust. She has also been raised to distrust the city of New York as a whole (Staten Island excepted), and the Woman in White has explained what happens to her universes when another city like New York is born, so Aislyn is actually willing to sacrifice New York for the sake of these other universes.
So even though Aislyn can sense that she is an avatar and these people are her fellow avatars, it doesn’t make her any more willing to help them, so she blows them off her island, too. Hong ends up back in Hong Kong and the others reappear on Wall Street.
They have no choice but to give her up as a lost cause and do what they can to help Manny wake New York. They manage to succeed, and along the way, they discover another avatar. Bronca’s protégé, Veneza, whom she loves like a daughter, turns out to be the avatar of Jersey City. Despite the fact that she technically doesn’t even live in the same state as NYC, the birth of a city doesn’t recognize legal or physical boundaries, only spiritual ones. And since everyone who lives in Jersey City says they’re from New York, their claims make their status as inhabitants of New York real.
Bronca is not happy about this development, knowing how much danger Veneza will be in, but Veneza is excited to be part of the action.
The book ends with a coda that is also written in first person from the perspective of New York, just like the prologue. All the avatars (minus Aislyn) sunning themselves on a beach on Coney Island. In the distance, they can see that Staten Island has been completely overrun by the Woman in White. It’s eclipsed by a large, circular shadow, even when there are no clouds overhead.
I can’t wait to see what happens next.