The City of Brass

OK! New Year! I'm gonna do this blog thing!

But for real, I had good reasons for not writing over the past few months, so sorry about all the amazing books you've missed hearing about. But it's fine! I'm back! And I've already read 4 books this year!

The first one I'm going to talk about is The City of Brass BECAUSE IT WAS AWESOME, OK?! I've seen it around, but haven't heard as much chatter about it as I have other books. It could be because everything I follow is YA centric, and this is technically adult fantasy (even though really, it could totally be YA; one of the two POVs is 16 and the other is 20 so really, it's just a technicality, much like Queen of the Tearling).

So, a summary:

It's the Napoleonic era and Nahri is a con-woman/healer/thief. Nahri has been on her own a long time, so she had to get creative to survive. She's learned how to spot a mark, how to read people, and how to swindle them. And she makes a decent living from it. But what she really wants is to be a doctor. See, Nahri has a special talent: she can sense what is wrong in a body and sometimes, she can even heal it. She also has a gift for languages. She can understand/speak any language once it's spoken to her. But there is one language she knows that she's never heard anyone else speak. She assumes it must be the language from her homeand, but she has no idea where that is or who her family is.

One night, she's performing a healing, and during her chanting, calling on a warrior for healing (for effect, because you know, words have no healing powers),  someone appears. A man who swears a lot and is very angry to have been summoned by a human. The problem, as he discovers, is that Nahri is not fully human. She's half Daeva (djinn {shafit}), which is an abomination all its own.

This warrior is Darayavahoush (Dara), and ancient Daeva who was once turned into a slave and served humans for hundreds of years. He doesn't know how she summoned him, but he knows the safest place for her is the City of Brass, where the djinn live.

In the City of Brass, Ali is a second son, prince who is raised to be something similar to a head of security for the nation. He will protect his kingdom with his life, never marry or have a family. His father is the king, and is testing him. For he knows Ali has sympathies and questionable loyalties. Not everyone is treated equally in The City of Brass, and Ali wants that to change. So he's secretly been funneling money into an anarchic organization--not so they can bring the government down, but rather, so they can help the half human, half djinn (shafit) members of their society who are so mistreated.

There is so much happening in this book, and it's all so well plotted and the world building is just magnificent. It deftly tackles racism, the meaning of justice, good and evil, all while building complex relationships between the characters.  Everyone in this book is so fleshed out. They are all morally gray (Nahri preys on the gullible to make her living, Dara started a war that killed thousands of innocents, and Ali executes a good man because he was told to). And that's just the main characters. The supporting cast is similarly well thought out and it was simply delightful. I can't wait for the mext book, because it's going to delve into secrets that I know were kept in this one.

So, basically--read it. Tell me what you think when you do (even though I will likely have forgotten half the story by then bc I have THE WORST memory).

P.S. The cover of this book is beautiful, so when you see it, I don't  know how you can resist it unless you're some kind of monster.

Life After Life

See? I read things besides YA!

Life After Life is by Kate Atkinson, a bestselling author with an impressive backlist of books. When this book came out a few years ago, everyone was talking about it and I desperately wanted to read it. But then, there were other books I desperately wanted to read, and I was in school, and it was really thick, and and and. You know how it goes. Ultimately, I'm glad I waited. If I had read this when it came out and when everyone was hyped up about it, I would have been desperately disappointed.

It was OK. At first it was really confusing.  It follows Ursula Todd, a British girl born in 1910 who dies on the day she's born. You're probably wondering: wait, the main character is dead? The answer is yes and no. Her life is saved when the physician snips the cord around her throat, and she takes her first breath. As Ursula grows up, she dies numerous times. But then, time resets and she has the chance to live these moments over--to change whatever it is that killed her. The catch is, no one actually knows this is happening to her. It's like the reader is a god looking down on the world and watching another god reset this girl's life over and over to see what will happen.

Ursula only experiences very strong senses of deja vu. She knows something terrible is going to happen and that she can find a way to prevent it. This is especially poignant when World War I ends in 1918 and the family's maidservant goes out with her beau to join the crowds of people celebrating. Know what else happens in 1918? The Great Influenza. I'll let you draw your own conclusions about what happens. #nospoilers

It was interesting to read the same experiences and watch them play out differently. It was interesting to see what a huge impact something that happened when she turned 16 has on the rest of her life, and then how her life changed if that didn't happen. It was almost like a choose your own adventure story. You remember those, right?

Overall, I liked it. It was well written. It wasn't a bad story. It just wasn't riveting. It might have been more interesting if I had read it for a book club, if I was planning to discuss the different events with a group of people. But having read it on my own, it wasn't what I was expecting. And your expectations can make a huge difference in how you feel about a story. Sometimes, the there's too much hype.