Hi friends, happy Wednesday! I hope you’re all having a good week so far, mine’s been more low-key than I thought, which is surprising me. Today I’m posting my review of N.K. Jemisin’s novel The World We Make.

You can read my review of book one: The City We Became

The World We Make by: N.K. Jemisin: Evil still lurks within the city of New York, the Woman in White is still out there, threatening to destroy the universe. So the avatars of New York must band together, with the help of other cities around the world, to help take her down for good. For a plot and idea that sounded so promising, this just failed to deliver. This novel continues where the first left off essentially and we’re still out following the same core group of characters, with a few new ones added to the mix. If this reader is being honest, they don’t really get why the new characters were added. This started off as the boroughs of New York City having to come together to save the city… but now in this novel, the world is under threat and so we had different cities from across the globe show up. The only thing with that is, only a handful of cities were mentioned/showed up, and left it feeling super underwhelming and underdeveloped. Even the way everything resolved just felt flat and boring, like the author just wanted this to be over. This novel was not as a good as the first. The first had heart and soul; this one just felt like a dump of concepts that could have been really cool, if only it was fleshed out properly. The reader could feel in the writing that the author wasn’t all that into this because the writing felt lazy, a lot of clichés and just on the nose references, the pacing felt strange, like it felt rushed, and nothing felt like it was explained properly. The reader had read other reviews before reading this, how this novel should never have existed and they would have to agree to a degree. It wasn’t like this was a bad read, but it lacked so much in quality, especially when the first book was so good, the reader had such high hopes for this and they were just let down. The characters at least felt more developed in this one; it was a slow development, but that was done really well. We really felt like we got to know these characters better, and we got to see them grow and come together better for one another; that was all really well done, and probably the only thing that stopped this from being a complete wash of a book. In the end, this was an alright book, but don’t go in expecting anything like the first.