The City We Became

This book focusses on characters that are personifications of (boroughs in) New York. I personally didn't really enjoy this book, but I wonder if that is because I'm not super familiar with New York and its boroughs and their characteristics.

The book was paced really quickly in the sense that a lot of action/important things kept happening and there was very little time of downtime. Which brings me to my main issue, which is that I didn't really get attached to the characters because I felt I didn't really get to know them, every time I felt I was getting a feel for a character either we switched to a different one or some action happened.

Just as a note: Manny's sudden obsessive love for the NYC avatar also felt weird and out of place.

It also didn't feel like the characters were making smart decisions, which doesn't have to be a bad thing, but often they talked about what would be a good idea and then would choose not to do that for some reason. Like when they left Long Island to fend for herself when knew they would feel left out and be less likely to work with them (but maybe this makes more sense if you're more familiar with the relations between the boroughs).

The ending also felt a bit contrived, even though some pretty important stuff went wrong, something magically happened to fix it in time to have a positive ending. Long Island didn't want to work with them, so we'll just immediately give up on her, but oh how lucky this other girl that's been helping, just happens to embody this other place that kind of belongs to NYC anyways, so she can just fill that spot and everything's fixed. I like happy endings, but it felt a bit out of nowhere.

I did enjoy the part where they had to heal a city's representative with things that are quintessentially related to their city of origin, I thought that was a fun idea that you could have interesting discussions about.