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 Novice

Not gonna lie, this was super lukewarm for me. The Novice is about Fletcher, an orphan adopted by a blacksmith. They live in a small medieval type town on the edges of the kingdom. In this world, humans are warring with orcs, and not really getting along with dwarfs or elves either.

So, you know, Lord of the Rings.

To help fight the orcs, there are soldiers called Battlemages. Battlemages have been tested for an affinity for summoning and can summon demons from another world. They capture them and use them to help them fight.

So, you know, Pokemon.

Fletcher has never been tested-he lives too far away and they don't test orphans for reasons having to do with bloodlines and the implications of people not from certain noble families having Battlemage blood. But Fletcher is given a summoning scroll out of gratitude for a kindness, and he accidentally summons a demon--something he's not supposed to be able to do.

He leaves home and travels to the main city, where there's a school for training Battlemages. There, he is able to reach out and make friends with a dwarf, an elf, and other humans, which was incredibly uncommon given the bad history between the races. But Fletcher is just generally a good guy. I mean, a really good guy. He sticks up for people, he's not racist or prejudiced, he tries to include everyone. Except maybe the nobles at the school, who are, in all fairness, absolute douches. Because, you know, entitlement.

The book wasn't bad. I just didn't get into it. You could definitely see the author was heavily inspired by other fantasy worlds. There were also strong elements of the Eragon series at work (I didn't enjoy that either). I think it's a great story for someone who is new to fantasy (or even new to reading) and hasn't seen many of these elements before, but I read A LOT of fantasy. For me, it felt like I'd read the same story before.

I will comment on a couple of things I think it handled well.

First, Fletcher wasn't the most talented Battlemage at school. I think it was cool that the author didn't write Fletcher to be more powerful than everyone else. When they were determining levels, my expectations were conpletely turned on their heels when he turned out to be just average. He gets better using technology because it's the only way he can win the competition they have to be in at the end of their year. Plus, this new tech only comes about as a result of his friendly collaboration with dwarfs. 👍

Second, I think the racism aspect was handled very well throughout this book. It's definitely iffy (but necessary!) to handle social issues in books, and if they're not done well, there's a lot of blowback. Go look at some reviews of The Black Witch by Laurie Forest. I couldn'teven finish it because it was so problematic. I think Matharu was sensitice, had an open main character, and showed the benefits of cooperation between different races (in addition to the reality of many people being against it).

Again, I can see the appeal this story had for a lot readers, and clearly tons of people love it. It just didn't thrill me 🤷‍♀️