Reviews with content warning for Fire/Fire injury - The Kingdom of Copper

Really strong sequel to the first book! The last 40% had me GAGGED!! The world and character building is developed further in this book in a way that is done really well without any heavy info dumping. Plus it’s all paced so incredibly well. Can’t wait to read the third and final installment!!

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singalana's review against another edition

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adventurous reflective tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

Even though I listened to it as an audio, I had to SLOG through this book!

It has been about a year since I listened to the first part of the trilogy. It was a huge mistake to wait that long because I spent about the first 20 % of the book wondering who that character was, what that word meant and what happened in the last book.

After I got over that, the book started dragging for a different reason: NOTHING MEANINGFUL HAPPENS! It feels like there are no stakes, and so much time is spent on describing the most meaningless things. As one reviewer pointed out, everything that the characters try to do is thwarted by someone more powerful.

About 60 % in, I realized that I do not care about any of these characters. Except maybe for Dara, because he is at least a little bit interesting. There’s no real feeling of danger, and I knew nothing bad would happen to the characters. The main character, Nahri, is insufferably righteous, the same as Ali. As one reviewer put it: 99 % of the characters are magical racists, religious fanatics or war criminals. Not exactly a likeable bunch.

Spoilers!

If I remember correctly, there’s a little bit of romance between Nahri and Dara in the first book, and I started rooting for Dara. In this book, Nahri is forced to marry King Ghassan’s son, and we get to see how evil and manipulative Ghassan is. Dara is brought back to life to serve Manizheh, who plans to oust the Qahtanis and restore Nahid rule to Daevabad. HOWEVER, it turns out that Manizheh is the evil one, and when she and her forces attack Daevabad, ALL of the characters forget what kind of a**hole Ghassan was, and everyone is very sad that he’s dead. RIP. Nahri is, of course, a smart and spunky heroine and saves the day, yay!

But in all seriousness, I could not give a damn about any of these characters, especially since they are all so infuriatingly dramatic all the time. It sucks out any real impact a really dramatic scene should have when the characters are gasping and staring in shock about half of the book. If the author succeeded in something, it was when in the first book, I started to like Dara, even though he is practically a war criminal. Then, in the second book, I’m supposed to root for the Qahtanis, I guess?

In addition to that, this book is all over the place about the shafit, the “mixed-bloods”, who are part human. The shafit are treated as something to be saved, and when they lash out for being treated like cattle, they are suddenly wild animals.

This book has way too many elements, it’s way too slow, and everything is so damn dramatic all the time. I’m so glad this is over. Let’s see if I pick up the last part of this series in a year or so after I have forgotten how messy and frustrating this was.

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embee3's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional hopeful medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

5.0

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avasbookmark's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

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readwith_e's review against another edition

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Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes

5.0

After all of the beautiful world/character building and plot twists of City of Brass this book was already set up to be fantastic but it still surpassed my very high expectations.
Thank you, Chakraborty, for keeping me on my toes throughout this book and introducing me to some truly captivating mythology. I’m not done with the series yet, but I can already tell how heartbroken I’ll be to leave the breathtaking world of Daevabad.

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erebus53's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Wading back into the fraught and politically interwoven world of the Daeva, could begin to get overwhelming. I was very interested to see what happened to my favourite characters though.

This book finally sees people talking about what happens when the heir to the kingdom, Muntadhir, falls in love with a man art arms. Dammit why can't you all just let them be happy! And wait, in the last book didn't we find out that Jamshid has even more secrets about his person that even he is probably unaware of...? I had to find out more, and I do wish it took less that 20 chapters to unfold! But there is so much to unfold in a place where you arrange marriages for political reasons, and when everyone is lying to each other - things get messy in a great bit hurry.

Meanwhile back in the small desert town of Bir Nabat, the exiled prince finally seems to have stopped getting regular visits from assassins. He's knuckled down in serious service to the community as an irrigator and well builder and is starting to bring prosperity to a place that was dwindling into the dust. Less said about magical water powers the better, but everyone close to him knows that he doesn't come up for air nearly enough to seem.. normal, and he's awfully good at falling asleep in random places and accidentally waking up having "found" a brand new spring.

And then one of his rich cousins turns up with a year's worth of taxes in cursed salt, that only someone with their bloodline can return to Daevabad, and if it doesn't get there then there might be military retribution so .. he's wrangled back to his home city, consequences be damned.

Seems that everyone is preparing for the biggest festival in decades, and also that everyone who ever wanted to attack anyone is waiting for that time to do all their "plans".

Nahri petitions her father-in-law Ghassan, to bankroll a rebuild of the hospital her people once used, and to be able to treat the half-blood Shafit there as well as anybody else. She and Ali are working to try and patch up relations within the city, but their idealism can only get people so far..

Civil unrest is at an all time high, and meanwhile, plotting in the background Manizheh has her own plans, and central to them is re-re-resurrecting Darayavahoush. Again. Poor b*stard. We get to find a bit more about the history and magic of the land, the nature of Ifrits and the Marid.

Oooh this gets messy. I'm not a super fan of battles, but I do like big reveals. It's tense and frustrating when you have enough information to cobble together what's going on, but the characters haven't been told yet. Why do revolutions have to be so messy!!? That poor library. That tower... hey people were using that! I might ned a bit of a break before I delve into future volumes.

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rinku's review against another edition

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dark tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.0

I’m gonna be honest: If I didn’t spend 15 € on The Kingdom of Copper, I wouldn’t have finished it. I just didn’t care about anything happening or any of the characters because many of their motivations were so unclear, and the main plot progressed just too slow for my taste.

One big problem I had with the novel is that it was too long, it could’ve been easily 100 or even 200 pages shorter. One of the reasons the book dragged a lot was the five-year time skip. After the disappointment that Locklands was, I’m really sceptical when it comes to long time-skips, and here, it wasn’t well executed. We spend the first hundred pages only with explaining what has happened in this time and how certain relationships have developed which was so boring. Nahri had to marry Muntadhir, the other prince of king Ghassan, and lives now at the court of Daevabad. Ali lives in a random village and now can control some kind of water magic, and Dara is just there and planning something. Even though there’s so much time spent with explaining and characters talking to each other and nothing more, I still didn’t get all the alliances, the different cultures and the reasons for their grievances.

Most of the time, I was just waiting for anything to happen because for at least half of the book, nothing that is happening has any relevance for the overarching plot, and I’m still not sure what this overarching plot is. The focus is on some hospital that should be rebuilt but I don’t know why I should care about this at all, it was just boring. Besides this, there’s barely any action and even less magic which was unfortunate as well. But we know something will happen at one point because in Dara’s POV, he’s planning a war with some people. It took me again such a long time to understand who’s he in an alliance with and what they have against their enemy. The problem I see with his POV is that it takes some of the tension away since we already know what will happen and what the plans of the bad guys(?) are. If we didn’t, the things happening would’ve been way more shocking.

Only like the last hundred pages were quite good and dramatic and the reason that I didn’t give this The Kingdom of Copper only one star. Even though there were some moments I still didn’t understand, like

where the random rebellion against the king came from or why Nahri was arrested, even though she obviously hadn’t to do with it

, or some that were predictable, like

Nahri’s mentor dying

, it was still interesting. The

was so creepy and a true threat and I loved to see how Muntadhir, Zaynab and Nahri worked together towards the end; it would’ve been so great if they did so earlier

Like I’ve said above, the biggest problem I had with the characters were that many of their motivations were not clear which led to me just being irritated because of their behaviour. For example, I thought that Ghassan would hate Ali and wanted him to die when he exiled him, but he’s so worried about him here which confused me so much. This should probably show that he’s a grey character, but this didn’t convince me. Another character I couldn’t understand at all was Nahri herself. Her extreme stubbornness annoyed me so much, just like her resentfulness towards Ali which I couldn’t understand at all – she seemingly forgot that Dara killed him as well. Talking about Dara, I don’t like him at all, and he annoyed me with his self-pitying since I just don’t care for him. I even had problems understanding the motivations of some side characters, like Jamshid. The only characters I kinda liked were Muntadhir and Zaynab, but that’s it.

The Kingdom of Copper wasn’t even a disappointing read for me since I had no expectations for it, it was just boring and confusing. This is so sad, considering that Chakraborty has such a detailed world and obviously cares quite a lot for it. I already bought the third book – I probably didn’t if I’ve read The Kingdom of Copper before – and I’ll find out how the series will end, I suppose.

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ariel790's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Set 5 years after the events of the first, Nahri is subjugated to deal with the politics of Davabad in order to survive.

Book 2 is more about the ins and outs between royalty. Brothers torn between their father, Nahri pulled between them, the king, queen, and people of her heritage.

Compared to the first, the authors writing has matured. Conversations between characters have a better flow, descriptions of settings, objects have more details. I feel she really captured the essence of sibling rivalry. However, due to the change of focus, the pacing is a lot slower. It isn't until about 70% in where everything comes together and the action hits. Makes for a different, yet complimentary story. The 1st still my favorite of the two, but 2 was still exciting and has me wanting to read the 3rd.

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