Scan barcode
A review by daumari
The City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty
4.0
I read this for r/Fantasy's goodreads book of the month for April 2019.
Really neat worldbuilding, and complex characters that interest me, though I don't know if I'd necessarily get along with any of them for extended periods of time (Nahri if anyone, but she'd probably fleece me). Dara is an ally for the most part, but he's got some shitty ideas on blood purity (could argue that's what he was raised with but when your magical being lives for millennia...?) and fantastic racism, though as I'm typing this I recognize most of Daeva society can be described as "shitty ideas on blood purity and fantastic racism". Prince Alizayid is our sympathetic reader-insert because of his naive nature, but he's also a zealot thinking about all the relative sins around him. In some ways, he reminds me of Moses-as-prince in Prince of Egypt where he lives in luxury but when he watches a slave get beaten realizes yiiiiiiikes, his society is full of inequality.
This makes me wonder about likability of characters, and whether or not I like a book- for example, I haaaaaaate Richard whatshisface in Sword of Truth, but I also hate the book because bleghhh multiple things frustrate me about it. City of Brass has an interesting enough world & fantasy politics that I can deal with characters baked in a society with complex social issues. The king of Daevabad is verrrrrry pragmatic and while easy to paint him as a villain, he could be so much worse and... shit's complicated!
It ends unresolved, so I'll look for the next book at some point.
Hesitant to call this #ownvoices because Chakraborty is a white convert to Islam, but she's done her homework and elements of Islamic mythology feel well researched (as she mentions in the acknowledgements, this kind of grew out of historical fan fiction) while living in Cairo.
Really neat worldbuilding, and complex characters that interest me, though I don't know if I'd necessarily get along with any of them for extended periods of time (Nahri if anyone, but she'd probably fleece me). Dara is an ally for the most part, but he's got some shitty ideas on blood purity (could argue that's what he was raised with but when your magical being lives for millennia...?) and fantastic racism, though as I'm typing this I recognize most of Daeva society can be described as "shitty ideas on blood purity and fantastic racism". Prince Alizayid is our sympathetic reader-insert because of his naive nature, but he's also a zealot thinking about all the relative sins around him. In some ways, he reminds me of Moses-as-prince in Prince of Egypt where he lives in luxury but when he watches a slave get beaten realizes yiiiiiiikes, his society is full of inequality.
This makes me wonder about likability of characters, and whether or not I like a book- for example, I haaaaaaate Richard whatshisface in Sword of Truth, but I also hate the book because bleghhh multiple things frustrate me about it. City of Brass has an interesting enough world & fantasy politics that I can deal with characters baked in a society with complex social issues. The king of Daevabad is verrrrrry pragmatic and while easy to paint him as a villain, he could be so much worse and... shit's complicated!
It ends unresolved, so I'll look for the next book at some point.
Hesitant to call this #ownvoices because Chakraborty is a white convert to Islam, but she's done her homework and elements of Islamic mythology feel well researched (as she mentions in the acknowledgements, this kind of grew out of historical fan fiction) while living in Cairo.