Reviews with content warning for War - City of Blades

Reviews tagging 'War'

City of Blades by Robert Jackson Bennett

10 reviews

halt_bullfrog's review

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adventurous challenging dark hopeful inspiring reflective sad 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

4.25

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bergha1998's review against another edition

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adventurous dark 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? It's complicated

3.75

This book focused so much more on war atrocities and trauma than I was prepared for. But it was done really well. It’s just a very hard book for that reason. I really liked the personal reflection Muglaghesh went through.

Fantasy, Philosophical Discussions, War

“Lonely places draw lonely people, she thinks as she walks farther north, the fort on her right. They echo inside us, and we cannot help but listen.”

“I just wish you to know that there is more to life than this. There is more to life than these… these great tasks we set for ourselves.”

“The way you feel about the place you grew up in is a lot like how you feel about your family.” “How’s that?” She thinks about it for a long time. “Like isn’t the same thing as love.”

“You aren’t born this way. None of us are. We’re made this way, over time. But we might be able to unmake some of what was done to us, if we try.”

“The world may not go on forever. But that does not mean we cannot try to make tomorrow better.”

“Peace is but the absence of war, and war itself is almost always inevitable. But when it comes, will our politicians admit it is war?”

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frostbitsky's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional mysterious tense slow-paced

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

4.0

This is an ARC that I got at NYCC 2015. City of Stairs and the ARC of City of Blades were free giveaways. There was a long queue to have the author sign them. I was on the queue for 5-10 minutes when I realized that the line looped around and was much longer than I thought. Not wanting to be late for the Elementary panel (that was outside of the Javits Center at Hammerstein Ballroom), I left before the books were signed but I kept them anyway.

City of Blades is a great expansion of the world building that began in City of Stairs. I liked the plot surrounding the mythology and the missing person mystery. It also gets a touch philosophical and theological when it comes to an afterlife. With no afterlife what is the point of it all? If it's all just an accident what is there to look forward to?

Which brings me to the characters using the curse word "hell". There were other curse words used, but it wasn't as excessively overused as in The Tainted Cup. I also have stated in my reviews of his other books how I feel that our vulgar words are out of place in an other-worldly setting, so therefore, why are the characters using the word "hell?" What is "hell" in this fictional world? With no belief in an afterlife and the kind of afterlife that was fashioned in this mythology, what is "hell?" It shouldn't exist in this world building. The characters shouldn't even have the words "heaven" or "hell" in their vocabulary, so I have issue that it was used at all.

I know that was a big rant. I did start to skip over the word all together, but I want to make it known that while I did just make a big deal about it, the cursing didn't ruin the book for me. I otherwise really enjoyed it.

In particular the charter development.
General Turyin Mulaghesh, though flawed, was very likable because she had honor, her goal was to serve, and she believed in accountability. The PTSD was very well describe and handled well. It felt true to life.

Sigrud was Batman in City of Stairs. Now he became Jason Bourne.

My heart just broke for him when he was grieving his daughter's death. What a gut punch when seeing her body in the morgue he was thinking back to her birth.

And Signe's death was so avoidable. A whole misunderstand and so not fair. But also so true to the realities of war. The fog of war.

Rada, I predicted she was not as she seemed and that her stutter was fake. I just didn't know the details of her corrupt plans.

Biswal was a war monger with wounded pride. I pictured him to look like Ray Stevenson playing Baylan Skoll in Ahsoka.

It all came together really well. What started as a missing person mystery grew into something with much more depth on philosophical and theological levels.

4 out of 5 Swords.

Favorite Quotes:
Page 31- But we forget another lesson of history when we do so: a slave will use any tool to escape their slavery, even those of their masters.

Page 69- Science is like a glacier: slow and indomitable. But it will get to where it's going.

Page 165- But seeing those memories in the thinadeskite mine-...-it was as if all the years since the March were just condensation on a pane of glass, wiped away with the flick of a hand, and on the other side was that ruined, scarred countryside, and she could not shut her eyes or look away.

Page 443- “You've always believed war to be a grand performance. But to me it's just killing, just the ugliest thing a person can ever do...So when you need to do it, there's no need to make a show of it.”

Page 481- "...Perhaps it is just that one who lives a life of war becomes a refugee from it.

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unboxedjack's review against another edition

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adventurous dark funny reflective 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

4.0

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imds's review against another edition

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

3.0

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szuum's review against another edition

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dark mysterious medium-paced

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

3.75

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bluejayreads's review

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4.0

After being surprised by the stunningly intricate world of City of Stairs, I was excited to continue the series. However, I was less excited when I found out book two followed not Shara, the protagonist of City of Stairs, but General Mulaghesh, a secondary character who didn’t get a lot of focus on book one. She was a perfectly fine character in a secondary role, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to spend an entire book with her.

Switching protagonists in the second book is always a risk, and for a while I didn’t think it was going to work out. I just didn’t like older, gruff career soldier Mulaghesh as much as I liked nerdy, clever Shara. But the stunningly intricate, richly detailed world is the best part of the series, and eventually it drew me back in. And by the halfway point, I had grown to like Mulaghesh, a semi-retired, traumatized soldier just trying to do the right thing.

There was less mythology in this book. Some of that is because the reader already has the context from book one and a lot of the details about the world and the divinities don’t need to be explained again. Some of that is because Mulaghesh is not a nerd like Shara and cares significantly less about the finer points of magic and dead divinities. There was some, but it was only plot-relevant details and less exploring interesting things. Although I did very much enjoy learning about a new divinity who was barely mentioned in book one.

The plot was a wild twisty thing. If you tried to put it in a box, the best option is probably “mystery,” but that’s way too small a word. Mulaghesh isn’t just trying to figure out who is behind this, but also why they’re doing it and what they’re even doing in the first place. There’s lots of investigating, which generally turns up weird stuff, and Mulaghesh doing her best to make the weird stuff mean something. If the world itself wasn’t so complex and detailed, I don’t think I would have put up with such a complex plot. But the Divine Cities series has one of the most intricate and detailed worlds I’ve read, so I was perfectly happy to puzzle through the baffling clues to a complicated mystery.

On occasion, though, the complexity tipped over into frustrating. In this case, there were valid reasons for keeping some secrets, bit nobody wanted to give Mulaghesh any useful information and after a while it got annoying. Conversely, nobody wanted to listen to Mulaghesh either, even though doing so would have saved a lot of trouble. And in the climax, every single possible thing that could get in her way did, which felt forced and overdone.

City of Blades wasn’t boring, but it was definitely slower paced. Personally, I think it could have been shorter. I also didn’t enjoy it as much as book one overall (but let’s be honest, very few sequels are as good as the first book). I still think this world is amazing, and I do intend to read book three, if for nothing else than I love learning about this setting and its dead divinities.

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ok7a's review against another edition

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adventurous dark medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
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 reflective tense 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? It's complicated

4.0

Neste segundo volume da Série The Divine Cities os protagonistas do primeiro livro se tornam coadjuvantes e a General Turyin Mulaghesh se torna a personagem principal. Cinco anos se passaram para os personagens desde City of Stairs. Shara Komayd se tornou Primeira Ministra, apesar de seu mandato estar sob risco. Sigrud je Harkvaldsson retornou ao seu país, abdicou do seu trono em prol da formação de uma república, se tornando uma espécie de embaixador. Contudo, em City of Blades, seguimos Mulaghesh que após ser forçada a sair da aposentadoria (ou seja, beber o dia inteiro a beira-mar) por Shara embarca em uma missão como espécie de “espiã” da Primeira Ministra nas terras de Voortyashtan. Este é um lugar ocupado pelos militares, mas assolado por guerrilha entre clãs de continentais e assassinatos ritualísticos. É dada a missão a general de, sem que as autoridades locais saibam, investigar e descobrir o paradeiro de uma agente do Ministério Saypuri desaparecida. Mulagesh é um excelente protagonista, uma cinquentona veterana do exército, traumatizada física (ela perdeu uma mão) e mentalmente pelos vários combates em que tomou parte, inclusive a batalha de Bulikov no Primeiro livro. Ela é um ponto de vista que raramente vemos como centro de uma narrativa. Outros personagens que merecem destaque são Sigrud, que teve também parte importante na segunda metade da obra e Signe, personagem introduzida neste livro e filha de Sigrud. Ela é responsável pela construção de um porto para Voortyashtan. Existiram personagens que tiveram o papel de vilões secundários, mas acredito que o verdadeiro antagonista foi a ameaça coletiva das sentinelas de Voortya, a falecida deusa da guerra e da morte.

A descrição dessas sentinelas foi tão sinistra que a ameaça da invasão por um exército delas conferiu a narrativa a sensação de tragédia iminente e inevitável.

Essa foi atmosfera que se formou ao final da obra. Desde o início Robert Jackson Bennett estabelece um clima interessante em City of Blades, um país dividido entre o controle do exército e a violenta cultura local. Em alguns momentos o livro teve atmosfera de terror folk, o que me agrada muito. A escrita teve problemas, sendo o primeiro deles “vício de linguagem”. O autor tinha o vício de em diálogos em que um dos personagens fazia uma exposição, o personagem receptor desta perguntava “so?” e o primeiro respondia “so....(segue explicação)”. Essa troca aconteceu várias vezes. Se tivesse sido apenas um personagem a utilizar essa expressão eu poderia interpretar que “aquele determinado personagem tem um vício de linguagem”, mas não era o caso, diversos personagens utilizaram essa mesma estrutura nos diálogos. Isso quebrou um pouco o clima por ser algo que considero uma falha do editor. Outro problema foi que em situações de conflito emocionalmente carregado a escrita se tornava bastante prolixa, longa e forçada. Na intenção, acredito eu, de dar peso a esses conflitos Bennett passou do ponto e o texto se tornou exagerado. Fora esses problemas a escrita foi boa e estabeleceu um bom ritmo. O enredo foi bastante bom, apesar dos twists serem óbvios ainda houve mistério (contudo o twist de quem era a mulher na City of Blades me pegou, apesar de acreditar que se eu tivesse refletido sobre isso a resposta seria relativamente fácil).

A morte de alguns personagens, em especifico Signe, filha de Sigrud, me surpreendeu bastante. A trama começa com “o que aconteceu com a funcionária do ministério? ” e passa a “como impedir o genocídio iminente?”. Diante disso posso dizer que a história é intrigante do começo ao fim. As respostas são obvias, mas a parte interessante é como Mulaghesh vai chegar até elas. Quanto a lógica da história ela não é tão clara. Em alguns momentos é necessário suspender a descrença porque as regras de magia desse mundo não são claras e muito é atribuído ao “Divino”. Contudo, se você deixar isso passar, a história contada vale a pena. Em geral gostei de City of Blades, apesar de achar a escrita nessa obra inferior a City of Stairs. Foi uma boa continuação do primeiro volume e Mulaghesh foi uma ótima protagonista, ouso dizer que gostei dela mais que Shara. Enfim apreciei bastante o aprofundamento no stress pós-traumático de Mulaghesh e ver, pelo menos em parte a dor de uma veterana de guerra que sacrificou um membro, sua mão, e sua consciência, devido aos crimes de guerra cometidos em nome de Saypur. As cenas de tensão e ação foram boas e prenderam minha atenção. O luto e pesar de Sigrud pela perda de sua filha Signe me atingiu em cheio já que esses são temas que me afetam muito. Acredito ter ficado com os olhos marejados em algumas cenas de Sigrud.

Balanceando entre os problemas do livro e os sentimentos que este evocou acredito que 4 estrelas é justo.

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poonam's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional 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? Yes

3.75

Didn't like the plot. Love the world and lore. Love the portrayal of war and violence by the author.

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