"A glorious fantasy."--Neil Gaiman Three-time Hugo Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author N.K. Jemisin crafts her most incredible novel yet, a story of culture, identity, magic, and myths in contemporary New York City. In Manhattan ...

Only a couple of us read this one, but none of us really loved it. The only thing the novel really had going for it was the core concept. Some of us thought that the idea of embodied avatars of cities was an interesting concept that created an intriguing storyworld, but others had seen that idea expressed in other places and thoughts this was a much weaker and more pointedly much more cliched version of that idea. It was also nice that the characters were much more diverse than you would normally see in this kind of story, and that had the interesting political ramification that NYC is much more a city of people of color than is normally depicted in fiction. Unfortunately, that didn't really save the characters from being very thin and pretty unbelievable. It was more like the author threw together a bunch of character traits than actually trying to make real people. But that was just one flaw in a very weak novel. The action of the story was plodding and uninteresting. There was never really a moment where there was any genuine threat. And some of the details were just so cheesy. Really Sao Paolo is restored by eating Brazilian snacks? Really, Staten Island is the boring, xenophobic enemy? And I mean, really, the villain of the book is from a city out of LOVECRAFT? I actually laughed at loud at that moment. Sorry, Jemisin, we gave it a shot, but there's just so much weak stuff in this book that we would never recommend it to anyone.