The World We Make by N.K. Jemisin

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The World We Make book in front of an iron statute of a female figure carrying a book.
Photo taken at the Cleveland Public Library

First things first: The World We Make is a sequel to The City We Became.  Highly, highly recommend you go read that if you haven’t yet.  In both books, Jemisin tackles the very real and present issues of gentrification, racism, bigotry, xenophobia, etc., but with a sci-fi/fantasy twist.  I’ll give a brief review of The City We Became, which I read a few years ago when it came out. Then I’ll jump into The World We Make.

Mini-Review: The City We Became

The City We Became book against a hazy gold background and a shadow of some kind of tentacled monster.
I took this photo ages ago and I’m not sure I could ever pull it off again.

Jemisin is the kind of author who will throw you right into the deep end. You may spend time flailing to get to the surface, but once you learn to swim, you never want to get out of the water. In this book, we learn that cities become living things, represented by human avatars. New York City is undergoing this process, but something’s different this time. Each of the boroughs must come together to protect the city.  A different person represents each borough and each has a connection to their part of the city. 

As a result, the chapters jump between the various characters’ perspectives. Manny, Manhattan’s avatar, who has lost most of his memories.  Brooklyn, who fittingly represents Brooklyn. She’s a former rapper and now a councilwoman, fighting to save her family’s brownstone. Bronca, an artist, represents the Bronx.  Pamini, a mathematician on a student visa, embodies Queens.  And from Staten Island, Aislyn.  Aside from Aislyn, all the avatars are people of color, and many are queer.  In addition to the avatars of the boroughs, there’s a primary avatar, who is missing. 

Then there is the Enemy, a force committed to city infanticide. The avatars are the only ones who can see this Enemy, but civilians are unknowingly impacted by its actions.  Despite being strangers to one another, the avatars must find each other and beat back the enemy. 

Jemisin does a great job using Manny’s amnesia to stand in for our complete loss as to what’s going on without being heavy handed about it.  Each character has such a different personality and background, yet they all feel like complete people right off the bat.  Jemisin is a master at writing stories from different perspectives.  Each time I start with one character, I don’t want their chapter to end, but by the time I start the next one’s, I’m now committed to them.  It takes a lot of skill to pull that off and Jemisin makes it look easy.    

I’ve only been to NYC once, and it was a brief trip.  I only visited Manhattan and Brooklyn, but I would love to go back for a more in-depth visit someday.  Jemisin write a fantastic love letter to the city and its people.  She doesn’t hide from the city’s struggle, but she dwells in the glory of all of its people, all their diversity, their myriad backgrounds, and their overarching identity as New Yorkers.

Ok, now on to The World We Make.

Cover of The World We Make on a stone wall with a few buildings visible through the fog.
Just a fun note, I delayed posting this review because I wanted to take the book to work with me and get some shots of it against the backdrop of downtown Cleveland (I know, definitely not New York, but this blog doesn’t make money so no travel budget). And then of course the day I went was the day it was completely covered in fog. There’s supposed to be a skyline back there.

There’s a lot I want to talk about, but I’m not sure what would count as a spoiler.  So I’m creating a World We Make spoilers page and I’ll go into some of the things there.  If you want to go into the book mostly blind, then just stay here.  But if you’ve read it or don’t mind learning more details ahead of time, check it out!

While it should probably go without saying, from here on out, there will be spoilers for The City We Became, so if you haven’t read that one yet, beware!

The book picks up pretty much right where we left everyone after The City We Became.  The borough avatars (minus traitor Staten Island, but picking up sixth borough Jersey City) along with the primary New York City avatar (going by the name Nyc, pronounced Neek) are adjusting to life as the living embodiments of a city.  While they have unique powers, they also still live their regular life.  And over all that looms the Enemy’s stronghold, hovering over Staten Island.  The Woman in White might not be able to directly enter the NYC, but the avatars (and the city) are not safe by any means. 

There are personal challenges – Brooklyn needs to save her family’s brownstone home from a tricky gentrification grab.  Manny is slowly figuring out his past, as well as struggling to figure out whether he can make a future with Nyc.  Pamini has work and visa issues, and so on and so forth.  But the bigger existential crisis is the Woman in White and the rest of the world’s avatars seeming unwillingness to address the problem. 

In this book, we branch out a bit and meet some other cities, including Tokyo and Istanbul.  We see a dead and lifeless city, a victim of the Enemy.  And we spend some more time with Aislyn and see how her deal with the devil is working. 

Current events drive the narrative of this book. (Though it should be noted that reality stole from Jemisin, as she was writing this first.)  A new mayoral candidate has appeared, claiming he will make New York great again and bring it back to “real” New Yorkers. But of course, the  so-called “real New York” he claims to represent is simply a figment of a hateful imagination.  It would be comforting to think this is simply the Woman in White’s doing but, as we know all too well, this kind of hate can thrive on its own without outside assistance. 

Overall, I thought this was very well done and I really enjoyed jumping back into this world. I appreciated the insight into why the Enemy did what it did and where it came from.  I also thought Jemisin did a great job of giving us an understanding of Aislyn without excusing or condoning her. 

Unfortunately, I felt like some of the characters got short shrift in this one.  We almost never heard from Bronca, for instance.  Overall, I felt like there was more emphasis on events rather than characters this time around, but it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, just different.  I missed feeling as connected with everyone this time around though.  I also felt the conclusion was a bit rushed, but as I’ll discuss in the spoiler section, additional knowledge clarified why. 

All that said, this was a powerful follow-up to a fantastic concept started in the first book.  And now that both are out, you can enjoy reading them back-to-back.  And if you haven’t read any of N.K. Jemisin’s other books, I strongly recommend them all. 

Find it here

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

/ Denise / 5 Comments
Cover of The Sentence by Louise Erdirch against a bookcase.

November is Native American Heritage month, so it’s a great time to check out the plethora of amazing Indigenous authors.  I’ve written reviews on some already, and I’ll be doing more later. (There’s absolutely zero reason to limit it to a particular month!)  If you’re looking to support Native-owned businesses and get some great books by Native authors, check out Birchbark Books.  It’s an independent bookstore whose owner is Louise Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain band of Chippewa Indians. She is also the author of today’s feature, The Sentence. 

The Sentence is, in a sense, a ghost story. A dead customer haunts a small Minneapolis bookstore. Not just any customer, of course, but the most annoying one. Because of course that’s the kind of customer who would come back and haunt a place. Flora was a white woman who desperately wanted to be Indigenous. Tookie, a thirty-something Native American employee, tries to find out how to help Flora find peace and move on. She soon learns that Flora died while reading a particular sentence in a book. When Tookie tries to read the book herself, eerie things begin to happen to her.

Yet the ghost of a frustrating customer isn’t the only silenced voice demanding to be heard. The story begins in November 2019.  Within months, the world fractures with the outbreak of Covid-19 and the Minneapolis police’s murder of George Floyd. The ghosts of our history soon fill the homes in which people sequester and then flood the streets along with the protestors, police, and tear gas. Tragedies big and small, intimate and emblazoned on screens around the world can only be ignored at our own peril. 

I cannot praise this book highly enough.  The writing is just so damn good.  (A common feature of Erdrich’s books.) The Sentence contains commentary on race and justice (and injustice), family, history, and more, but throughout it all is the power of words. The way Tookie constantly searches for just the right word at any given moment, and Erdrich’s way of breaking them down – well, I have to let them speak for themselves. The book opens:

While in prison, I received a dictionary.  It was sent to me with a note.  This is the book I would take to a deserted island. Other books were to arrive from my teacher.  But as she had known, this one proved of endless use.  The first word I looked up was the word ‘sentence.’ I had received an impossible sentence of sixty years from the lips of a judge who believed in an afterlife.  So the word with its yawning c, belligerent little e’s, with its hissing sibilants and double n’s, this repetitive bummer of a word made of slyly stabbing letters that surrounded an isolate human t, this word was in my thoughts every moment of every day.  Without a doubt, had the dictionary not arrived, this light word that lay so heavily upon me would have crushed me, or what was left of me after the strangeness of what I’d done.

It’s the kind of writing that sends a thrill. It makes you wish you could somehow harness even a smidgen of this skill.

Setting the book in a version of her own store, The Sentence is heaven for book lovers. There are so many titles referenced, and a bibliography at the end, my to-be-read list grew another three feet. I also appreciated the feedback on how not to be that kind of customer. You know, this kind:

            ‘I could have bought in on Amazon, but I said to myself – although I live miles away, other side of St. Paul – I said to myself that I really should support the little independent bookstores. So I drove all the way here and you know it took me an hour because I-94 is down to one lane again?’

There’s a lot of little lessons on how not to be a well-meaning but cringy white liberal, something we as a group often need. 

But on a more serious note, it’s still odd to read about the early days of the pandemic and the protests. Obviously, I lived through them. Some of the scenes mirrored my own experiences – searching frantically for something I could use as a mask because we needed groceries and didn’t have delivery options set up yet, trying to figure out whether I really needed to wipe down said groceries, the sudden shrinking of the world to the walls of my home.

And then the video. The calls for mama. The increasingly desperate pleas of bystanders to stop, as George Floyd’s killer triumphantly corrupted one Black man’s symbol of protest against police brutality to take the life of another Black man. The protests. The burning of the precinct. The helicopters and the curfews and the National Guard. The weighing of the importance of being part of the protests vs. the risk of a deadly virus that thrives in close contact.

As a Minnesota native who left the state years ago, I appreciated having a first-hand account of living through it. If you’ll forgive the personal digression, it brought me back to an example of how our education shapes us, and the importance of having a variety of voices.  I remember clearly being in first grade, learning about the Civil War and being proud that my state was on the right side of that historic crucible, as though I was personally responsible for that choice.

As I got older, I learned a more complex side of that history – that during that same period, Minnesota’s treatment of the Dakota led to the largest mass execution in U.S. history. In college, I saw a photo of a lynching that occurred in Duluth during the 1920s. Throughout elementary school, I learned about the Rondo neighborhood, a Black middle-class neighborhood destroyed in the 1950s to make room for the interstate (I-94). 

More and more, I learned that while Minnesota was a great place to live and raise a family for white folks, it was a completely different story for Blacks, American Indians, Hmong, Somalis, and others. Some people might complain that this is critical race theory.  On the contrary, it’s vital to remember that there’s no simple “good vs. bad.” One can admire the ideals a state or country might have, but it’s imperative to also recognize its flaws. Life is complicated; history is complicated.  Good and bad can co-exist in an identity and it is our job to recognize both and everything in between. The ghosts of our history can guide us, not haunt us.

If we listen to them.

Once The Sentence reaches May 2020, sections are labeled by day: May 25, May 30, May 31.  And then May 32, May 34.  It’s an encapsulation of how that monumental month stretched past our usual boundaries. Life couldn’t simply keep going on as it always had. It didn’t stop, but it was not the same.

Some things in life are just that powerful.  A disease. A video. A murder.

A sentence. 

Find it here.

What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher

/ Denise / 1 Comment
Book cover of What Moves the Dead in shadow, with green vines reaching out from behind

I’ve written before about how much I love Kingfisher’s books, and this is another example of why.  What Moves the Dead is a little different from her other books. It’s a take on an existing story, but Kingfisher makes it her own. The result is a creepy, quick tale, perfect for October reading. 

What Moves the Dead is Kingfisher’s retelling of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, The Fall of the House of Usher.  Our narrator is Alex Easton, a sworn soldier from the (fictitious) country of Gallacia.  They have rushed back to the House of Usher upon receipt of a letter from Roderick Usher.  Roderick’s sister, Madeline, is near death.  Alex’s long history of friendship with both the Ushers, and service with Roderick during the recent war, spurs them to return, in hopes of at least providing moral comfort for their friends during this time of illness. 

But even before reaching the formidable estate, a pervasive sense of rot and contagion oozes through the grounds. The curious spread of all matter of fungi is one manifestation of this miasma.  Among the mushrooms, Alex meets Miss Eugeina Potter, an amateur mycologist. (Amateur only due to the Royal Academy’s shortsightedness regarding sex.) The mysterious presence of mushrooms normally never found in European climates fascinates her.  Alex leaves her to her studies and makes it to the manor. 

The worn and wan appearance of both Roderick and Madeline shocks them.  An American doctor is also staying at the house, but he is just as bewildered as Alex by whatever is destroying the Ushers.  Nor is the strangeness limited to the siblings.  The very house seems possessed.  Townsfolk tell tales of rabbits behaving in odd and unnatural ways, which Alex will come to see for themself.  And in the dark, the lake glows with an eerie bioluminescence, reminding those present that there is more to the House of Usher than meets the eye. 

While I had a passing knowledge of The Fall of the House of Usher before reading this, I didn’t know much.  (Ok, ok, basically my only knowledge was watching the house explode as a two-second gag on the Simpsons.) Before writing this post, I quickly read through Poe’s version to have a point of comparison, though I have no intention of writing an English lit essay on it.  (Sorry if that’s what brought you here.  My only suggestion is to find a different thesis than “What Moves the Dead and The Fall of the House of Usher have many similarities and differences.  In this essay, I will…”)

The takeaway is that Kingfisher once again brings an extraordinary amount of life, history, and character to each of the people we meet (and Alex’s horse, Hob, to boot).  Despite its brevity, there’s no skimping on the details that make each of these people who they are, quickly making us very concerned about what is happening to them – and what may be lurking in the darkness for them.  The sense of unease is omnipresent; when a character makes you laugh, it’s like laughing in a graveyard – unexpected and quickly clamped down before it calls unwanted attention to your presence.  I loved it all. 

As I read, the story kept reminding me of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s fantastic gothic horror novel Mexican Gothic.  Thus it delighted me to see it listed as an influence in the afterword.  If you haven’t read Mexican Gothic, check that one out after this (and then keep reading both authors’ other books). 

I also really appreciated Kingfisher’s deftly woven grammar lesson early in the book.  As you may have noticed, Alex is non-binary and while I have been using they/them pronouns in this review, Alex explains that Gallacia has numerous pronouns and sworn soldiers get their own dedicated pronouns of ka/kan. I won’t presume to be better at explaining the grammar better than the author, so I’ll let you discover that yourself.  I will say that if my own grammar textbooks had been even half as entertainingly informative, I wouldn’t be spending most of my editing time painstakingly transforming instances of passive voice. 

So whether or not you’ve read the Poe version, do yourself a favor and pick up What Moves the Dead.  Then keep an eye on the rabbits around you…

Find it online here

The Library of the Unwritten

/ Denise / 1 Comment

(And other novels from Hell’s Library) by A.J. Hackwith

Book covers of The Library of the Unwritten, The Archive of the Forgotten, and The God of Lost Words, next to a Halloween decoration of a stack of books with a skull on top and a bottle that says Love Potions next to it.

I love novels about books and reading, so The Library of the Unwritten grabbed my attention while I wandered through the bookstore.  When I read the subtitle “A novel from Hell’s Library,” my excitement grew, and when I read the back of the book, I was hooked.  The premise is there is a library, located in Hell, but not a part of Hell, filled with humanity’s unwritten books.  Every story started but never finished, each idea mulled but never realized, appears in the leather-bound books of the Library of the Unwritten.

Every library needs a librarian, of course, and the current librarian is a condemned soul named Claire, who died roughly thirty years prior and found herself an apprentice to the former Librarian.  After he disappeared, she took the mantel of Librarian, and with her assistant, a Muse named Brevity, Claire makes sure the Library remains safe from the demons surrounding it and perhaps more importantly, that the books remain asleep. 

For the unwritten desperately want their stories told.  Occasionally, a book will manifest as a character and try to make its way back to Earth and its author.  It’s the librarian’s job to make sure that doesn’t happen.  There are a few exceptions: the Damsel Wing is a fun addition. The damsels originated as ladies whose only purpose in their (unfinished) story was to serve as the hero’s prize. Fed up with their lack of characterization and opportunity to grow within their story, and with no desire to meet the hacks who tried to write them, the Librarians allow them to live outside their books in their own section of the Library. 

But overall, a character must return to its book.  As our story opens, a hero-type character made a break from the Library and is back among the living.  Claire, Brevity, and Leto, a fairly new demon, are on the hunt.  Unbeknownst to them, a fallen angel named Ramiel is on a mission from Heaven, also hunting for pages from a book. 

As much as I would love to go into detail about all these characters and their adventures, I want you to be able to experience it all for yourself.  This is a fantastic world and I love how Hackwith pulls it all together.  Claire & Co. travel to other realms, including Valhalla, that have their own wings of the Library.  All the way through, circumstances force them to examine who they are and who they want to become.  When Library of the Unwritten ended, I hated to say goodbye to those characters and that world.

Thankfully, there are two more books: The Archive of the Forgotten and The God of Lost Words.  I won’t say much about them, since I don’t want to spoil anything that happens in the first book.  Both are great stories and continue to expand the realms and the characters’ development. 

The Archive of the Forgotten has a lot of story lines dealing with the immediate fallout from the previous book.  It’s well done, but it has a thing that I struggle with a lot in stories – the separation of characters.  It makes sense – everyone needs growth and sometimes our traumas isolate us from those we care about and who care about us.  But it can be hard to watch (or read).  The God of the Lost, meanwhile, left me in tears by the end, which surprised me.  It was such a beautiful ode to reading, writing, and creating that I found myself overwhelmed and filled with love.

Hackwith’s conception of the afterlife is fascinating.  Parts of it reminded me of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, shows like Supernatural, and the movie Constantine.  But those are just some of the ingredients that bring it all together.  Hackwith creates a fascinating world with its own philosophies and theologies. As mention earlier, there are various realms reflecting other belief systems.  Even Christianity’s Heaven and Hell exist, with some changes.  Hell in this version is only for those who condemn themselves to it.  For only a second, I thought that wouldn’t be a terrible system, thinking of how few people would want to be in Hell.  Then I realized that such a concept would mean a Heaven filled with the narcissistic egoists who believe they are flawless and continually the victim, while those who struggled to do the right thing would hold themselves to an impossible standard and thus condemn themselves unjustly for eternity. 

But Heaven poses a dilemma I’ve noticed in a lot of modern stories.  If we include angels and demons, Heaven and Hell, in a story, there’s the problem of God.  It seems easy for us to accept the idea of Satan to be real and active in human affairs; devils walking among us would explain so much.  But a force of omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent good?  If such a god exists, why wouldn’t they help us?  If angels are around, why don’t they ever seem to be winning? Instead of Heaven being paradise, we seem better able to imagine it as, at best, a sterile neutrality, burdened with bureaucracy and an absent Deity. 

Sure, it makes sense that we can’t have such an all-powerful being around in our art, able to end all conflict in the blink of an eye – there isn’t much of a story there.  But when we look at earlier times, there didn’t seem to be a problem with imagining such divinity and still having the world be a fairly miserable place. 

Has our sense of justice and fairness changed? If we create God in our image, have we reached a point where we realize that such a thing could not exist and the world continue as it does?  Heaven as a bureaucracy – something started with reasons and order and processes for a defined purpose, but now just continuing via inertia, without the spark or soul to give it true life or meaning.  Perhaps, however, the right soul could make the needed changes. 

These were just some of the thoughts Library of the Unwritten and the rest of Hell’s Library’s novels inspired. At the end, it once again made me so incredibly grateful for all the authors out there, all the readers, and all the libraries and librarians, wherever they may be.  

Find it here

The Devil Takes You Home by Gabino Iglesias

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Book cover of The Devil Takes You Home by Gabino Iglesias

There are monsters all around us – and some are hiding within us.  So Mario discovers in The Devil Takes You Home as his life shatters like a glass tabletop around him.  He knew some of these monsters.  As someone with “too many syllables” in his last name, turned down for jobs he was perfectly well qualified for, he had always been intimately familiar with racism in the United States.  He and his wife, Melisa, struggled to make ends meet, but their four-year-old daughter Anita brought them plenty of joy.  Until the doctor uttered the word “leukemia.” Suddenly, their life became endless drives between their home and the hospital in Houston, desperate prayers for a cure, and listening to medical professionals boil down their daughter’s losing battle as a “fascinating case.”

Soon enough, the monsters of our failed system rear their heads.  [SPOILERS IN THIS PARAGRAPH STARTING HERE FOR THINGS THAT HAPPEN RIGHT IN THE BEGINNING AND ARE PART OF THE DUST JACKET SYNOPSIS.] Mario loses his job for spending too much time at his daughter’s side.  Insurance doesn’t cover nearly enough of the costs of care and once Mario’s job is gone, even that paltry help disappears (ironically, Mario worked for an insurance company).  Bills are piling up, the hospital calls more often to demand payment than to offer any solutions, and soon Anita is gone.  Only the collections calls remain.  Grief rips apart Mario’s marriage and just like that, he is alone, in debt, and unemployed.   

Upon losing his job, Mario decides to contact an old acquaintance and former co-worker.  Brian, a white meth-head, always had several side-gigs going, each of differing levels of illegality. In no time, Mario finds himself hiding behind a van in the dark of night with a gun, waiting for his target to appear.  Brian assured him this man deserved to die, but didn’t provide many details. And Mario found that he didn’t really care.  When he blows off the back of the head of the man, he discovers a monster of some kind made its home in this man.

Mario also finds there’s a monstrous side living in him as well.  He takes on additional hit jobs, making money and finding a way to channel his anger and grief.  But then Brian introduces him to Juanca, who proposes one final job with the promise of a big payday.  All they have to do is survive a near-impossible job knocking off a cartel’s money shipment.  Vaguely imagining a plan where the money will bring Melisa back, Mario agrees. 

The rest of the story follows the men’s journey to Mexico and back.  They encounter all sorts of awfulness – racists, cartel bosses, man-eating alligators, and violence of all kinds.  Meanwhile, each member of the crew contemplates their companions’ potential to double-cross, as well as their own. 

Overall, it’s a spell-binding book.  I’m not huge on slotting everything into a particular genre, which is good, because it would be hard to figure out where exactly to place this.  It’s located in the horror section and it definitely fits, but it’s also more than that.  Then I saw some interviews with Gabino Iglesias where he describes this work as “barrio noir.” It’s a mix of horror, crime, borderlands, languages, and more, with a dash of the supernatural thrown in.  (Just like in the last review, this is another book with a lot of non-English dialogue.)

The Devil Takes You Home sometimes evoked strains of Almanac of the Dead.  It emphasizes the artificiality and arbitrariness of national borders.  It does not shrink away from the destructive impact of centuries of racism in the United States.  And like Almanac of the Dead, The Devil Takes You Home refuses to allow us to hide from the awful violence so many endure. 

There’s also a level of the supernatural to the story, which was interesting but some of it felt extraneous.  Mario has visions from time to time, brief warnings or whole scenes that felt incredibly real but didn’t happen.  It plays into the feeling of vertigo the book creates, where you can’t quite seem to anchor yourself in its reality.  It’s also terrifying to see how people’s faith and belief in spiritual powers results in horrendous cruelty and torture.  (Including a scene of brutal child abuse.) All of that is really well done.  The stuff that didn’t work quite so well for me was the suggestion of actual non-human or not-quite-human monsters.  They don’t appear often, and it didn’t kill the vibe of the book by any means.  But they could have disappeared and not been missed.  There was plenty of horror in the human characters. 

Overall, this is a bleak, creepy, haunting tale and hard to put down. 

Find it here