A review by bluejayreads
City of Miracles by Robert Jackson Bennett

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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