Reviews with content warning for Child death - City of Miracles

Reviews tagging 'Child death'

City of Miracles by Robert Jackson Bennett

6 reviews

bergha1998's review against another edition

adventurous emotional mysterious reflective sad tense 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? Yes

3.75

I wasn’t sure how this one was going to end, or the whole series really. I love the worlds this author makes and a the moral quandaries. Also the characters and the plot twists. It was nice to finally understand why Sigurd was Sigurd.

Fantasy, Good vs. Evil, Found Family

“What puzzles the dead are,” says Taty. She looks away into the wilderness. “They take so much of themselves with them, you’re not even sure who you’re mourning.”

“We are all of us but the sum of our moments, our deeds. I died, Sigrud, and I died doing something I believed in. I will die doing it again. But if I lived my life rightly, what I did during it will echo on. Those I helped, those I protected—they will carry my moments forward with them. And that is no small thing.”

“But how many times has one person performed an unspeakable atrocity, all in the name of making the world better?“

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seasonedreadings's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional sad 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? Yes

4.0

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ok7a's review against another edition

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adventurous dark 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

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ggcd1981's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional mysterious 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

3.25

City of Miracles is the end of the Divine Cities Series and, to me, it was an underwhelming ending at that. In this last installment we see familiar faces. Mulaghesh, my favorite character, made a few appearances. Shara featured a bit more but also as a side character. Ivanya was a character from City of Stairs that grew on this third book. She was Vohannes’ fiancée and after his death in the first book she inherited all his riches, but the trauma of everything that happened in the first book affected her, she became paranoid about security and about the Divine. As such she became obsessed with training and arming herself. I really liked her. From the characters introduced in this third book the most important were: Taty, Shara’s continental adoptive daughter, who plays an important part at the end;

Nokov, who is an antagonist. He is the tortured child of two divinities who becomes obsessed with consuming other divine children to grow his power and remake the world.

Sigrud is back and is the main character of this third book. I like Sigrud, but in this book he was a little too much. The author took every single opportunity he could possibly think of to remind the reader that the Dreyling was a “suffering lone wolf who only knows how to cause death”. This characterization was so heavy handed that from one point on I just started rolling my eyes every time Sigrud started brooding.

The atmosphere is the strongest aspect of City of Miracles: set in a world that feels both old and at the same time in fast evolution, but still haunted by the Gods of old and by the past gruesome wars they caused. The writing of Robert Jackson Bennett is good, as I said, he did a great job with the atmosphere and the lore of the world he created, but his writing does have some problems. The first I already mentioned, the heavy handed character work of Sigrud. The second problem is that he tends to overwrite. The reader can clearly see how hard Bennett is trying to be quotable. The author put so much effort into writing dialogues and inner monologues that sound poetic and deep that they just come across as a bit cringy. It’s like he was writing thinking to himself “oh, they’ll sure want to highlight this part”. These passages don’t flow; they just don’t feel organic. The synopses of the plot is: Shara Komayd, once Prime Minister of Saypur, has been assassinated. News travels fast and far, even to a remote logging town somewhere northwest of Bulikov, where the silent, shaven-headed Dreyling worker picks up the newspaper and walks out. He is shocked and grieved and furious; he's been waiting thirteen years for Shara, his closest friend, to reach out to him - to tell him to come home. He's always believed she was running a long operation, that there would be a role for him at the right time. Now he has nothing to live for - except to find the people who did it. Sigrud wasn't there for the death of his daughter Signe, and he wasn't there when his old comrade Shara was murdered. Now he will find answers, for her, and for himself.

He's made a promise to protect Shara’s adoptive daughter Taty, but things get harder when it seems a divine being is after killing other children of divinities and Taty appears to be one of them.

The plot sounds interesting and the beginning of City of Miracles was very intriguing, but soon most of the plot twists become pretty obvious and you see them coming miles away, so by the end there are few surprises. The logic of this book is not its strongest aspect either. There is science and technology in this world, but whenever something hard to explain (and/or convenient) happens it is attributed to the “Divine”. This “Divine” or power of the Divinities doesn’t have clear rules so is used as explanation pretty arbitrarily. Even for a soft magic system some explanations can feel as a bit of a stretch. So, yes, the logic can be faulty. My enjoyment of this final installment was good, but the problems I pointed out really hinder the book as the grand conclusion of a trilogy, so it was a bit underwhelming since the two previous books were better (City of Stairs being the best of the trilogy). However, the very final chapter pulled at my heartstrings

as Taty sat beside Sigrud’s dead body on the beach and mourned

, this hit a little too close to home and I did cry. It was a powerful scene but that alone cannot elevate the whole book. Still it was a solid enough book and I give it 3.25 stars.

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bluejayreads's review against another edition

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4.0

Like Hogfather, I read this book in fits and starts due to the unfortunate fact that when reading books at work, I am at work. That definitely affected my enjoyment of the story. With a story as complex as this one, it definitely affected my understanding, as well.

City of Miracles follows Sigrud, a whole new protagonist. I wasn’t concerned about this protagonist switch because unlike Mulaghesh from book two, I already knew and liked Sigrud as a pretty major player in the previous books. I was concerned that I would be upset at Shara’s death, because I liked her so much in the first book. But she hasn’t been the protagonist for a while now and she’d changed in the couple decades since book one. I found it didn’t feel as tragic as I’d expected.

This book is much lighter on the details of the world. Some of that is likely because of my stop-and-go reading style, which probably led to me missing some of the finer details. And some of it is because Sigrud is much less politically involved and much less curious about the intricate details of the divinities. In book one, Shara was a full-on nerd and that allowed a lot of foundation work for establishing a rich and complex world. Mulaghesh in book two was significantly less nerdy, but she knew a fair bit and was not averse to finding out more. Sigrud, though, didn’t care about the finer points of the divine or even the current situation. He’s a man of violence and just needed to know enough to figure out who he needed to injure. The foundations from the previous book were there, but it was sparse on the new details. It made the world feel a little less rich and full than in previous books.

What City of Miracles is, though, is the most thematic of the series. It explores societal progress and how it feels to those who knew how it used to be, cycles of violence and how traumatized children grow up to inflict trauma on others, and the cyclical nature of life and history. Especially with Sigrud, whose whole existence at this point is being able to withstand and dish out extreme amounts of pain and violence, his journey towards recognizing that suffering can’t and won’t redeem him mirrors the story as a whole.

Like the other two books in the series, the story is complex and multi-faceted. In the previous books, it was fitting, as such a rich and detailed world deserved a layered and complex story. In this one, with the world feeling less rich, it seemed unnecessarily complicated and even annoyingly so at times. It focuses much more on the action, which fits with Sigrud’s character, and the thematic elements than the details of the world and the reality-distorting cosmic horror of the divinities, making the complexities of the plot feel unnecessary and overdone at times. It felt longer than it needed to be, even though I can’t identify anything that really needed cutting out. But of course, this could all be because I read it in pieces instead of completely through like usual.

Despite my struggles with it and regardless of whether they were due to the book itself or my reading experience, City of Miracles kept me interested all the way through. Though it felt less robust in the world-building department, it definitely felt full and rich in emotion. It led to a bittersweet but fitting and satisfying conclusion. And though at the end I felt like I just wanted a little something more from it, it was a very solid conclusion to the series.

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alisonvh's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

I don’t know if I would say this was a satisfying end to the series. It’s definitely bittersweet, but I’m just glad I got to hang out with these characters again. I’m so bummed this series is over 😭

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