In rapid succession, Jemisin introduces the rest of her major players: Bronca (the Bronx), an indigenous Lenape woman who runs an arts and cultural center Aislyn Houlihan (Staten Island), a thirty-something, White librarian and Padmini Prakash (Queens), an Indian PhD student from Jackson Heights. Manny, with the help of Brooklyn Thomason, the avatar of Brooklyn, drives her away, killing the tendrils. They are confronted by a Woman in White, the avatar of the Enemy. Later, he and his roommate, Bel, hike through Inwood Hill Park where they see more white tendrils sprouting from the ground. Recognizing these as hostile, he channels his newly acquired city energy to destroy them. En route to his new apartment, the cab encounters a bad traffic jam on the FDR Drive, and he notices a geyser of weird, white tendrils sprouting from the street. Forgetting his previous identity, he calls himself Manny. In time, he understands that the city is calling him to anoint him the avatar of Manhattan. Almost immediately, he is rocked by vertigo and strange visions of an extra-dimensional Manhattan, abandoned and in ruins. Some time later, a young grad student, new to the city, gets off a train at Penn Station. As the primary avatar, the young man battles the creatures, but in temporarily defeating them, he is severely wounded, and the Williamsburg Bridge collapses. One day, the young man is chased through the streets by shape-shifting creatures from another universe that seek to establish a foothold in the city. The man is the embodiment, or avatar, of New York City which is being born at this moment, and Paulo, the avatar of Sao Paulo, Brazil, is its midwife. He is befriended by Paulo, a stranger who understands these sounds and takes the young man under his wing.

He hears bizarre sounds from under the streets, interpreting those sounds through his paintings of strange, gaping orifices.

Like the first book in Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, The City We Became opens with a nameless character-in this case, a homeless, young Black man who inhabits the rooftops of New York City.

The city we became book