The World We Make

Hardcover, 368 pages

Published Oct. 31, 2022 by Orbit.

ISBN:: 978-0-316-50989-3

(1 review)

All is not well in the city that never sleeps. Even though the avatars of New York City have temporarily managed to stop the Woman in White from invading—and destroying the entire universe in the process—the mysterious capital "E" Enemy has more subtle powers at her disposal. A new candidate for mayor wielding the populist rhetoric of gentrification, xenophobia, and "law and order" may have what it takes to change the very nature of New York itself and take it down from the inside.

In order to defeat him, and the Enemy who holds his purse strings, the avatars will have to join together with the other Great Cities of the world in order to bring her down for good and protect their world from complete destruction.

N.K. Jemisin’s Great Cities Duology, which began with The City We Became and concludes with The World We Make, is a masterpiece of …

All is not well in the city that never sleeps. Even though the avatars of New York City have temporarily managed to stop the Woman in White from invading—and destroying the entire universe in the process—the mysterious capital "E" Enemy has more subtle powers at her disposal. A new candidate for mayor wielding the populist rhetoric of gentrification, xenophobia, and "law and order" may have what it takes to change the very nature of New York itself and take it down from the inside.

In order to defeat him, and the Enemy who holds his purse strings, the avatars will have to join together with the other Great Cities of the world in order to bring her down for good and protect their world from complete destruction.

N.K. Jemisin’s Great Cities Duology, which began with The City We Became and concludes with The World We Make, is a masterpiece of speculative fiction from one of the most important writers of her generation.

3 editions

enne📚 reviewed The World We Make by N. K. Jemisin

The World We Make

3 stars

This is the second and final volume in The Great Cities duology. I really enjoyed The City We Became (although I am not a New Yorker to know how any of that landed), but this book just doesn't feel as tightly written and as solid as the first.

Jemisin gets at this in the acknowledgements after the book. US politics and covid caused plot wranglings, and what was intended to be a trilogy got smushed into a duology to at least get it done. I feel like you can this compression in the book itself. The boroughs don't really get much character development. I wanted to see more of the other cities.

The ending itself was quite satisfying to wrap everything up, but the path to get there felt rushed.