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.

Wonder Woman: Warbringer

First of all, guys, Leigh Bardugo is my queen. I love everything she writes. I'm going to a signing of hers later this month and let's all hope I'm not PMSing at the time because there will be happy tears. I'm stupid excited.

Second of all, I don't even care about DC all that much because all of their movies have been trainwrecks. But Wonder Woman was amazing. AMAZING!

So to have my favorite author write such an amazing story in my favorite genre: heaven, ya'll.

In Warbringer, Diana knows that she has a powerful legacy to live up to, and she feels wholly inadequate to it. She's the only one on the island of Themyscira who hasn't earned her place there. All of the other women have died and cried out to a goddess at their death. Diana was born there. So she has a lot to prove, but few chances in which to do it. Her mother won't let her leave the island on a quest, so she tries to prove it by winning a foot race. Because you don't enter a competition to lose.

But the path she takes leads her by the sea,  where she sees a ship sinking and hears a girl cry out. It is punishable by banishment to bring someone onto the island, but Diana cannot just stand by and let someone die. Obvs.

So she brings her to the island, only to find out from the oracle that this is no ordinary human: she's the Warbringer. A being around whom tensions run high and fights break out. Helen of Troy was the first Warbringer, and she passed the gene to women in her line as generations passed. And we all know what happened with Helen...

Alia has no idea she is the Warbringer. She's just a Greek/African American girl from a wealthy family that is beset by threats. So she is protected by security continuously, especially after her parents died and her older brother took over care of her. So Alia was not supposed to be on this ship in the Mediterranean (where I assume Themyscira is). She did it to be free for once. And see how that turned out? Rebellious teenagers get into all kinds of scrapes.

Diana learns that the ony way to prevent Alia from starting World War 3 just by being alive is to find the resting place of Helen of Troy. So begins a journey to Greece, on which they are joined by Alia's brother, Jason, his best friend Theo (also Alia's lifelong crush) and Alia's best friend Nim. And the whole way, different factions are chasing them to kill Alia because no one wants World War 3 and obviously the only way to prevent it is by killing an innocent 17 year old girl. Y'know, for the greater good and all.

What's the most amazing about this book is how epically diverse Bardugo made this cast, despite this story being a primarily Western (caucasian) one. Alia and Jason are biracial, Theo is Brazilian, and Nim is Indian and unabashedly gay.

What's not to love about this?

You get to see Diana in the modern world. The island has tons of books (even modern ones) and women from all time periods, so she's not totally behind the times, but it's different seeing something than reading about it. Hilarity ensues. And Diana is, of course, inhumanly strong, so her first meeting with Jason is pretty fantastic.

There's just so much winning with this book. If you love YA, strong female heroines, clever dialogue, and/or superheroes, you will love this book.

I feel like I want to read it again...

Like, tomorrow...

Should I do it?

City of Saints and Thieves

I was intrigued by City of Saints and Thieves because it was one of Barnes and Noble's Discover Great New Writers selections, but it was also YA. I've never seen a Teen book make this list.

The story follows Christina aka Tina aka Tiny Girl aka Tiny. Tina is an excellent thief. She has to be; it was the only way to avoid becoming a prostitute on the streets of Sangui City. She works with the Goondas, a street gang in the city, to make her living--and work toward taking revenge on the man who killed her mother.

When her mother first brought Tina to Kenya from Congo, she found a job as a maid for Roland Greyhill, an American businessman. There, she spends five (7? Can't remember) easy years of childhood, plays with Greyhill's son, Michael, and gets a new sister. But everything changes when her mother is murdered. Tina, 12 years old, takes her sister and flees to the streets because she knows exactly who killed her mom: Mr. Greyhill.

Tina stashes her sister in a nun-run school where she was able to get a scholarship, then goes to the head of the Goondas for help in taking revenge. She wants to kill Mr. Greyhill. But he has other ideas--among them taking Mr. Greyhill's extensive fortune. So he gives Tina a book: The Count of Monte Cristo (and c'mon, this is my all time favorite book. How could I not love this?!) So Tina decides the best formula for revenge is: 1. Dirt. 2. Money. 3. Blood.

So when she gets a chance to break into the house to copy info from Greyhill's computer, she takes it. With a little support from computer genius Bug Boy, she gets all the info she needs tot ake Greyhill down.

She also gets caught.

She has to spend the next week with Mr. Greyhill's son, Michael, who convinces her to try and find proof that his father did it--because Michael is positive he didn't.

This was a whole different type of mystery that was absolutely impacted by the setting. The situation is dire: Tina is beholden to this game, they're chasing down a murderer, being chased by murderers and militia. The book taking place in war-torn Africa just added a new element to what otherwise would have been a typical Nancy Drew type mystery. Tina has much greater concerns than whether her friends will betray her (she knows they will) or what clothes to wear (she lives on a roof, for goodness sake). She has to figure out how to survive on a daily basis.

And there are no happy endings like in your typical YA story. Tina doesn't fix Africa. She doesn't take down the bad guys or a corrupt government. She solves a mystery that has deeply affected her life, and then her life goes back to normal-stealing and surviving.

It was a phenomenal story, and the narrator was spectacular. I cried a few times. I can't imagine a life like many in Africa live. This is my second book recently that takes place there and deals with that violence, and it's horrifying. But I do hope more books are written (and read) about it.

Empress of a Thousand Skies

YES. READ THIS BOOK. I absolutely loved it. As I was reading this futuristic Sci-Fi space opera, I thought it seemed short and I was afraid--what if it wasn't fully developed? What if the author didn't think through the world fully and it was something that just didn't come together well? (As a fan of Leigh Bardugo and Laini Taylor, the QUEENS of world-building, this was a legitimate concern for me). And I really wanted to love this book. Turns out, my fears were unfounded! 🙆‍♀️💃👏❤

The Empress of a Thousand skies follows two characters and is told from alternating points of view. The first is Rhiannon (Rhee), the only surviving member of the Ta'an ruling line. Her family was killed, and by a fortunate accident, Rhee was not on the ship when it blew up. She has grown up away from the public eye, practically exiled from her kingdom to keep her safe. Now, the time has come for her coronation, and she plans to take revenge on the person who killed her family.

The second character is Alyosha (Aly). He's a Wraetan refugee who joined the military and is now a reality TV star. His homeland was bombed after years of war and prejudice against his people. Aly works hard to show that not all Wraetans fit the stereotype: he's not loud or aggressive.

"People already thought Wraetans were loud and picked fights. He wasn't going to add fuel to that fire."

So aside from the fact that this book is amazing just because of the story, it also tackles social issues. Race is obviously a huge one it addresses, but it also addresses issues of privacy and personal rights.

In this world, everyone is fitted with a cube. Cubes record memories. Everything that happens in a person's life is recorded so they can look back on it whenever they want. The cube puts the memories into files, and those files that are accessed most often are kept near the surface of the cube. If you like remembering that time you and your sister braided each other's hair, you can pull it up immediately. On the other side, if you hate that memory of your grandmother dying, you never have to access it.

You can porbably already see some problems with this...what about those who have suffered trauma? If they never think about it, can they heal? There are even conspiracy theories that people can be tracked by their cube! *Gasp!* What if someone could get into another person's cube and change, or even erase, memories.  How dangerous would something like that be?

On her way to the coronation, someone tries to assassinate Rhee. She escapes, but the media is claiming she's dead, and they're blaming Aly, who found an (almost) empty escape pod from Rhee's ship. He's the perfect scapegoat: he's Wraetan, so people are already suspicious of him. Better yet, blaming him heightens suspicionof and prejudice toward other Wraetans, which could spark a war. Rhee has to find a safe place and a way to make it to the throne. Aly has to find a way to prove he didn't kill the princess.

This book was fantastic. I loved the characters. I loved the action. I loved the story. I hate that it was short, but I love that it was packed so full. I can't wait to read book two!