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imds's review against another edition
- 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
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child death, Grief, Injury/Injury detail, Body horror, Slavery, Violence, Vomit, Blood, Confinement, Abandonment, Colonisation, Death, Murder, Police brutality, War, Gore, Genocide, Xenophobia, and Gun violence
bluejayreads's review
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.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Injury/Injury detail, Death, and Violence
Moderate: Confinement, Grief, Body horror, Child death, Racism, War, Colonisation, Murder, and Gore
Minor: Sexual assault, Death of parent, and Slavery
PTSD, trauma flashbacks, fantasy racial slurs
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