Library The City of Brass (The Daevabad Trilogy, #1)

Read online The City of Brass (The Daevabad Trilogy, #1).pdf PDF, EPUB, MOBI, TXT, DOC The City of Brass (The Daevabad Trilogy, #1) “Greatness takes time, Banu Nahida. Often the mightiest things have the humblest beginnings.”So What’s It About?Nahri scrapes by in 18th century Cairo, hiding her strange abilities and scavenging a living as a healer and con artist. But when a fake ceremony goes terribly wrong, she accidentally summons an ancient djinn and must come to accept that real magic exists – and that she is an important part of a strange, foreign world of spirits and myths. Together with the mysterious djinn Dara she will travel to the famed magical city of Daevabad and become embroiled in a dangerous scheme of ancient resentments boiling over. It will take all of her skill to survive Daevabad.What I ThoughtWell, the bad news is that I walked away from this book fairly nonplussed. The good news is that I can clearly and perfectly delineate between the parts of this book that worked for me and those that didn’t. Its principle strengths are, without a doubt its imagery and world-building. I can feel Chakraborty’s passion for creating a beautiful, complex, well-realized fantasy world, and Daevabad positively shines. I’ve seen some reviews stating that the book was too descriptive but I personally loved all of the descriptions and felt like she was entirely successful in creating a world suffused with beauty and detail.In addition to lush descriptions and imagery, The City of Brass also features strong world-building. There are numerous key races and factions that all have their own complex histories, beliefs and rivalries that are successfully integrated into the story. The book is definitely highly concerned with the conflicts and prejudices that stem from tribalism and ancient rivalries, and for the most part I felt like Chakraborty had a good grasp on this topic. I’ve seen a lot of reviews complaining that the world-building was unnecessarily convoluted and was therefore really difficult to understand, but I personally did okay this time. I used the glossary in the back of the book and the guide on Chaktraborty’s website a few times and I was just fine for the most part. Charlotte? Understanding complex fantasy world-building? It’s likelier than you think!If the world-building and imagery are this book’s successes, its failures begin with the plot. Simply put, it’s actually quite sparse. About half of the book is travel and info-dumping about the world, and the second half is mostly comprised of Nahri pouting about her opulent new life and Ali making terrible decisions. These last two points relate directly to my second large concern with The City of Brass – the characters are by and large extremely irritating. I totally get what she was going for with each character: Nahri is the savvy, plucky con artist with a heart of gold, Ali is the kind-hearted and naive young man trying to do the right thing but over his head in complex politics and Dara is the….well, he’s the broody hot guy with a dark past.The unfortunate thing is that the characters are deeply, deeply frustrating more than anything else. Both Nahri and Ali make stupid, impulsive decision after stupid, impulsive decision until you lose almost all sympathy for them. Nahri whines about her privileged new life and flagrantly shirks her responsibilities as a healer while shafit die in the streets, and Ali gets manipulated by essentially every single person who talks to him. Dara just exists to hate-banter and have drama with Nahri and explain the world. I will say that when I first wrote this review, I had a whole angry section about all the insane shit he does at the end of the book, but now that I look back, my critique feels a little silly. I hated what he did, yes, but that doesnt mean that the book is worthy of critique because of it by S.A. Chakraborty