Reading this book was a really weird experience for me, because of my own personal history.
I was born in New York, but have zero memory of the place, because my (Australian) parents who were working there for five years, including the year of my birth, left very shortly thereafter for Australia. I grew up in Australia, and immigrated to the UK as an adult. Apart from a handful of very brief trips as a tourist when I was a child, I have not set foot in New York since the year of my birth, and the last time I was there was more than twenty years ago. My parents loved the time they lived in New York, and fell in love with the city (but never wanted to live in the US long-term, and certainly didn't want to raise children there), and so I grew up with their romantic, starry-eyed reminiscing about the city as a kind of background noise — but obviously my impression of the city is based on what it was like, for them, in the 1980s. So reading the book was a mixture of getting the really obvious references and allusions (if they lined up with things that matched my parents' experiences) and lots of other stuff, particularly about the boroughs in which they had never lived, making sense, but being a bit more distant from my (secondhand) experiences of the city.
I'm someone with a deep sense of place, and who falls deeply in love with the cities in which I live, and as a result I tend to really enjoy fiction written from a similar place of deep love, and sense of place. Obviously that shines through beautifully in The City We Became. But the exceptionalism, and the lack of curiousity and depth with which other cities were treated really grated on me. I don't object to stories deeply grounded in one city (I love the Rivers of London books, for example), but to be honest it would have been preferable if Jemisin didn't introduce any other city personifications at all, rather than the superficial clichés that we got instead. Although I suppose that is accurate for a certain type of New Yorker for whom all other places pale in insignificance before the perceived complexity of New York...
it's New York exceptionalism in a way that I'm not a hundred percent comfortable with. Of all the cities? All the cities that ever were?
no subject
I was born in New York, but have zero memory of the place, because my (Australian) parents who were working there for five years, including the year of my birth, left very shortly thereafter for Australia. I grew up in Australia, and immigrated to the UK as an adult. Apart from a handful of very brief trips as a tourist when I was a child, I have not set foot in New York since the year of my birth, and the last time I was there was more than twenty years ago. My parents loved the time they lived in New York, and fell in love with the city (but never wanted to live in the US long-term, and certainly didn't want to raise children there), and so I grew up with their romantic, starry-eyed reminiscing about the city as a kind of background noise — but obviously my impression of the city is based on what it was like, for them, in the 1980s. So reading the book was a mixture of getting the really obvious references and allusions (if they lined up with things that matched my parents' experiences) and lots of other stuff, particularly about the boroughs in which they had never lived, making sense, but being a bit more distant from my (secondhand) experiences of the city.
I'm someone with a deep sense of place, and who falls deeply in love with the cities in which I live, and as a result I tend to really enjoy fiction written from a similar place of deep love, and sense of place. Obviously that shines through beautifully in The City We Became. But the exceptionalism, and the lack of curiousity and depth with which other cities were treated really grated on me. I don't object to stories deeply grounded in one city (I love the Rivers of London books, for example), but to be honest it would have been preferable if Jemisin didn't introduce any other city personifications at all, rather than the superficial clichés that we got instead. Although I suppose that is accurate for a certain type of New Yorker for whom all other places pale in insignificance before the perceived complexity of New York...
it's New York exceptionalism in a way that I'm not a hundred percent comfortable with. Of all the cities? All the cities that ever were?
As you say, this really didn't sit well with me.