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.

The Forbidden Wish

I don't know if you guys noticed, but retellings are HUGE in YA. Here, let's make a list:

The Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer
Hunted by Megan Spooner
A Twisted Tale series by Liz Braswell
A Thousand Nights by E.K. Johnston
Cruel Beauty by Rosamund Hodge
The Wrath and the Dawn by Renee Ahdieh
The Splintered series by A.G. Howard
The Dorothy Must Die series by Danielle Paige

And the list goes on...

The Forbidden Wish is an Aladdin retelling, and there aren't very many of those. There are a few Thousand and One Nights retellings, but not many that focus on just Aladdin.

One thing I love about Jessica Khoury is that her books are stand alones. That is very rare in YA. I read Origin years ago and I loved it, too. That was before I was quite the YA buff I am now. I don't know how I'd feel about it now if I read it again. But I will say The Forbidden wish did not disappoint me. Jessica Khoury is vastly underrated, I think. We don't get a lot of requests for her books in the bookstore, and it's a shame. She's a fantastic storyteller.

It's a story about Zahra, a thousands year  old (female!) genie, and Aladdin, a thief. But it's also about fixing past mistakes, finding redemption, saving a kingdom and, oh yeah, love. Aladdin is hired to steal a ring from the palace, but instead of taking it to the party that hired him, he keeps it. As soon as he steals it, it starts speaking to him, pulling him toward something. That's how he finds Zahra's lamp, which has been hidden for 500 years. Zahra expects Aladdin to be just like any other master: to make his three petty wishes and move on while she gets passed from greedy hand to greedy hand. Instead, he uses his wishes to take revenge on the man who killed his parents: the  Grand Vizier character who is the Sultan's brother. To do this, he has to become--you guessed it--a prince. He has to try to win the princess's hand in marriage. Aladdin and Zahra have to spend a lot of time together to make this happen and their forbidden attraction grows.

There is so much depth and subplot to this story that it's difficult to fully summarize it, especially without giving anything away. Ultimately, the book was amazing. I think Khoury found a great balance between action, character development, and the backstories, which must habe been incredibly difficult. The rimance between Aladdin and Zahra is not even the most important part of the story, which was nice. There was definitely growing romantic tension, but it wasn't over-emphasized. She didn't sacrifice the story to the romance.

All of the secondary characters are very well-developed. You get glimpses of their backstories that help you inderstand their motivations, who they're trying to impress, what their goals are, and so on. The setting is so vivid: it's a city with a rune-like shield around it to keep out magical creatures. A war between humans and jinn has been waging for centuries, and genies are an object of hatred (which makes Aladdin having a genie pretty dangerous). There are secrets and loyalties are tested. It has all the best, natural type of drama you want in a good story. Also, the cover is really pretty!  Trust me 😉