BOOK CLUB
The City We Became // HavenfallWWW.SCIFINOW.CO.UK Tell us what you’re reading on Twitter or Facebook | 077The City
We Became
City uprising
Release 6 March 2
Writer .K. JemisinN
Publisher ittle, Brown L
Book Group
Price 16.99£
Every once in a while, a
genre novel comes along that is
determined to fl oor you with its
brilliance and imagination. N K
Jem isin’s The City We Became is
one such novel; a bold, inventive
urban fantasy that deserves all its
praise. It began life as a short story
(which can be read in Jemisin’s
fantastic collection How Long ’Til
Black Future Month), which forms
the introduction here. New York
City is about to be birthed; achieved
when a city reaches a certain level
of maturation. But there are powers
at work that would see the birth
fail, a disastrous thing for the city.
Havenfall
Beyond the doors
Release 3 March
Writer S ara Holland
Publisher loomsburyB
Price 7. 9 9£Wanting to take over the
family business as a teenager is
ambitious. But when the family
business is running an inn at the end
of the world where annual peace
summits are held between the ruling
classes of other dimensions? That’s a
whole other level of ambition.
Maddie Morrow isn’t a normal
teen, though. Her mum’s on death
row for the murder of her brother,
though Maddie knows she’s
innocent; her uncle is the innkeeper,
responsible for ensuring the accords
between the worlds hold; and her
crush is a soldier from another world.
When the long-sealed portal to a
realm of monsters cracks open and
Maddie’s uncle falls ill, it’s left to her
to stop everything falling into chaos.The scene-setting info-dump at
the beginning of Havenfall is a little
intimidating, with a lot of names and
rules to remember. But once the story
starts in earnest, it turns out not to
matter. Sara Holland deftly crafts a
memorable cast of characters and
sense of place. Her supernatural
world makes sense: it owes a small
debt to C S Lewis’s Chronicles Of
Narnia, with the inn functioning kind
of like the wood between the worlds,
but still feels original.
The mystery unfolds satisfyingly,
too. The reader gets to feel Maddie’s
confusion and fear as various
powers make their play for her trust
and power; she makes some bad
decisions, but never out of stupidity or
contrivance. She’s a great character
even as the most ordinary person in
a book full of extraordinary ones,
and it’s impossible not to root for her
to succeed. Clearly intended as the
fi rst of a series, it’s hard to think of a
more promising YA franchise-starter.
Sarah Lines
To protect the city and its
inhabitants, human representatives
of the fi ve boroughs arise;
Manhattan, Staten Island, The
Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens
must unite to protect the human
representative of New York,
with the help of Sao Paulo and
Hong Kong. From there, the book
becomes an ode to the people,
foibles, and traditions that make up
New York City. It’s unapologetically
diverse, encapsulating a city at the
heart of the American melting pot.
Jemisin’s narrative manages to
dip in and out of so many forms
and infl uences, her novel is just
as much a construct of American
literary history as her city is a
social one. ‘I sing the city’ is all at
once Homeric and Walt Whitman-
esque. Ralph Ellison (directly
mentioned at one point), Neil
Gaiman, and Toni Morrison infuse
Jemisin’s pages, but feel utterly
unique to her; a writer at her peak.
Becky Lea