A review by rinku
Das Königreich aus Kupfer by S.A. Chakraborty

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. 
Expand filter menu Content Warnings