Sara’s Reviews > The City We Became > Status Update

“She cannot imagine a world where people who mean well can do any real harm. She cannot reconcile all these big, elaborate topics - multiverses and inevitable doom and life as a living city - with the simple reality of the Woman, who is a genuinely nice person. The world needs more nice people.”

“Padmini is Queens, land of refugees who’ve fled horrors, blue-collar people working themselves to death, and spare daughters mortgaged for an entire family’s fortune. She knows all about brutal choices and unavoidable sacrifice - and Manhattans question, cruel as it seems, is one that respects this knowledge.”

“Some part of her still hope for justice to prevail, and for her father to realize what a monster Conall is ... but the rest of her knows better. Her father has always been right: the only true justice is having the strength to protect oneself against invasion or conquest.”

“This isn’t the first time Bronca has been surrounded on all sides by those who would invade her, shrink her borders, infect her most quintessential self and leave only sanitized, deadened debris in their wake.”

“‘Nothing human beings do is set in stone - and even stone changes, anyway. We can change, too, anything about ourselves that we want to. We just have to want to.’ She shrugs. ‘People who say change is impossible are usually pretty happy with things just as they are.’”

“She doesn’t get English because English draws a distinction between the individual self and the collective plural, and wherever she comes from, whatever she is, that difference doesn’t mean the same thing. If there’s a difference at all.”

“Terror doesn’t always happen for good reason.”

“The fact that she applied these assumptions preemptively means there’s nothing he could’ve done to change them, but he still hates that he’s just confirmed her stereotypes.”

“Because we were just ordinary people going about our own business, and it bothered you to see us comfortable and unafraid.”

“‘God, I can’t wait to see which entire ethnic group they’re going to scapegoat in the wake of this one.’
‘Maybe it’s a white fit. Again.’
‘A ‘lone wolf’ with mental health issues, right!’”