The World We Make, by N.K. Jemisin

I really enjoyed The City We Became, the first volume in what I then thought was going to be a trilogy by acclaimed sci-fi writing Jemisin, in which major world cities become sentient, embody themselves in human avatars, and fight a cosmic evil. Along the way the planned trilogy turned into a duology, so the story concludes with The World We Make.

I enjoyed this book as well, and liked the clever way in which Jemisin creates the avatars who represent each of the cities. That was probably what I liked best, actually — the bigger, cosmic conflict, and the enemy the cities are fighting, always felt a little nebulous to me. The brilliance of the book was in its small moments when we meet London, or Paris, or Istanbul, all interacting with our main characters who are the cities of New York and its boroughs. The ideas of cities as near-superheroes in a fight against cosmic evil was never as compelling to me as the idea of cities embodying the history and spirit of the people who’ve lived in them — and that’s the idea this book develops really brilliantly.