Forever

I wanted to give this book five stars. It's a really beautifully told history of New York City—necessarily incomplete, since it's also the story of one man. But I was fine with that. I always get annoyed when I get this big-picture perspective of things in a book, when it's one person's story. I think, Wait, how do you know what was happening way over there, when you were way over here the whole time? I like also that the story is biased: we aren't told everything, we're told about what's important to the main character.

Throughout the book, there's a fetishisation of brown and black skin that made me feel a little squiggy, and nowhere is this more pronounced than where Delfina enters the picture. Further, I wish the same attention to detail had been given to all the Spanish bits as was given to New York's history. The verb conjugations, the vocabulary, and the idiomatic expressions were all wrong. It would have taken very little effort to actually talk to a Dominican woman and get them right. There were also a couple of instances where the prose was anachronistic; they were jarring and took me out of the story. For example, I remember a mention of Mars and thinking, Wait, what? I just didn't believe that a poor, Irish boy would have "Mars" in his headspace in the 1800s.

Strong, strong feels about including 9/11 in the narrative. I could see it heading that way and was really hoping that I would be wrong. While I was disappointed with the end of the story, I enjoyed the beginning and middle enough to make the whole thing a worthwhile read. If you love New York City, I recommend giving it a try. But it's really a whole lot about NYC, so if that sounds boring, I wouldn't bother; for me, it was the best part.