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seasonedreadings's review against another edition
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
Content Warnings
Graphic: Cannibalism, Animal death, Child death, Death of parent, and Child abuse
Moderate: Confinement and Torture
ggcd1981's review against another edition
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.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Gun violence, Injury/Injury detail, Murder, Abandonment, Torture, Violence, Death, Death of parent, Stalking, Child death, Child abuse, Colonisation, Confinement, and Grief
Moderate: Slavery and Blood
Minor: Sexual content
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