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morgandhu 's review for:
City of Miracles
by Robert Jackson Bennett
So much cones together so perfectly in the last installment of Robert Jackson Bennett’s Divine Cities trilogy, City of Miracles. At the end of City of Blades, The only main characters still standing are Turyin Mulaghesh and Sigurd je Harkvaldsson, and both are deeply scarred. Mulaghesh is soon to be drawn into the world of Sapuri politics by Saypuri Prime Minister Shaya Komayd. And Sigurd has seen his daughter killed by Saypuri soldiers, and become a hunted man, wanted for murder. Not even the influence of Shaya and Mulaghesh can clear him this time.
City of Miracles begins 13 years later with the shocking assassination of Shaya Komayd, no longer in politics. And Sigurd comes out of exile to perform one last service for his old comrade, employer, ally, and friend.
But what he discovers when he tracks down the assassin is much, much larger than the death of one woman, no matter how important and loved she was. The gods are dead, or departed from the world, but some of their children, the Blessed, remain. One such child was captured many years ago, set apart, tortured, by those who sought to make if him a weapon. But the events of the years that have followed freed him, and he want revenge, and to be so powerful that he can never be hurt again. And he has learned that killing the other Blessed can make him stronger, perhaps even change him into a God.
What Sigurd discovers is that Shaya spent her final years trying to oppose him, trying to locate and hide the children of the Divine from their brother and would-be devourer. And that Tatyana, Shaya’s own adopted daughter, may be one of the Blessed. With Shaya dead, it falls to Sigurd to protect Shaya’s daughter Tatyana, and the other Divine children Shaya tried to save. And stop the child of darkness from becoming the last and only god.
Sigurd has allies - some old, some new. Turyin Mulaghesh is no longer in her prime, but she is the Minority leader in the Saypuri government, and has some power and influence. And Sigurd discovers the woman who has been Shaya’s ally in her attempts to find and save the Blessed children, and is now Tatyana’s guardian - Ivanya Restroyka, the former fiancee of, and now very wealthy heir to, Shaya’s long-dead lover Vo Votrov. And there is Malwina, a young Blessed girl who worked with Shaya, and who has the gift of manipulating time.
The City of Miracles draws together the various themes that have resonated through the series - questions about faith, loss, grief, revenge, violence, and trauma, and how we as human beings react to them, are shaped by them, and recapitulate them. We have seen so many examples of one trauma begetting behaviours that creates more - from the violent response if a colonised nation taking revenge, to the madness of so many individuals, human and divine, in the face of loss and pain. The tortured become torturers, the colonised become colonisers, the bereft become those who bereave others, again and again, and in the course if this, create yet more pain and violence continuing down through generations. And yet.... the miracle is that there is a way to end the cycle. To let go of the pain. And when that happens, so many things are possible.
A profoundly meaningful conclusion to a powerful work of imagination.
City of Miracles begins 13 years later with the shocking assassination of Shaya Komayd, no longer in politics. And Sigurd comes out of exile to perform one last service for his old comrade, employer, ally, and friend.
But what he discovers when he tracks down the assassin is much, much larger than the death of one woman, no matter how important and loved she was. The gods are dead, or departed from the world, but some of their children, the Blessed, remain. One such child was captured many years ago, set apart, tortured, by those who sought to make if him a weapon. But the events of the years that have followed freed him, and he want revenge, and to be so powerful that he can never be hurt again. And he has learned that killing the other Blessed can make him stronger, perhaps even change him into a God.
What Sigurd discovers is that Shaya spent her final years trying to oppose him, trying to locate and hide the children of the Divine from their brother and would-be devourer. And that Tatyana, Shaya’s own adopted daughter, may be one of the Blessed. With Shaya dead, it falls to Sigurd to protect Shaya’s daughter Tatyana, and the other Divine children Shaya tried to save. And stop the child of darkness from becoming the last and only god.
Sigurd has allies - some old, some new. Turyin Mulaghesh is no longer in her prime, but she is the Minority leader in the Saypuri government, and has some power and influence. And Sigurd discovers the woman who has been Shaya’s ally in her attempts to find and save the Blessed children, and is now Tatyana’s guardian - Ivanya Restroyka, the former fiancee of, and now very wealthy heir to, Shaya’s long-dead lover Vo Votrov. And there is Malwina, a young Blessed girl who worked with Shaya, and who has the gift of manipulating time.
The City of Miracles draws together the various themes that have resonated through the series - questions about faith, loss, grief, revenge, violence, and trauma, and how we as human beings react to them, are shaped by them, and recapitulate them. We have seen so many examples of one trauma begetting behaviours that creates more - from the violent response if a colonised nation taking revenge, to the madness of so many individuals, human and divine, in the face of loss and pain. The tortured become torturers, the colonised become colonisers, the bereft become those who bereave others, again and again, and in the course if this, create yet more pain and violence continuing down through generations. And yet.... the miracle is that there is a way to end the cycle. To let go of the pain. And when that happens, so many things are possible.
A profoundly meaningful conclusion to a powerful work of imagination.