City of Brass
Feb. 28th, 2018 10:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraI finally finished S.A. Chakraborty's The City Of Brass! I feel like I've been reading it for ages although part of that is from having started it before school vacation week and then making no progress during school vacation week. It is also just a bit weightier of a tome than a lot of what I go for these days, and the pacing was uneven. Some momentum problems with characters not having obvious goals, other than "stall and see what happens". But I ended up really wanting to read the next one - this definitely felt like the kind of trilogy pacing where they're setting a lot of stuff up now, and it's (hopefully) going to pay off in satisfying ways later.
Sometimes I play a mental game with myself of "what did this get compared to in the pitch" (similar but slightly different to my "you will like this if" reviewing), and I think there's a good chance that this one mentioned Game of Thrones... there's a lot of factions and intrigue and longstanding ethnic conflicts and secrets, etc. We start out in Napoleon-era Egypt, but rapidly get into a separate fantasy society, so we can have all those politics and grudges without as much real-world baggage. (Although I also don't know that much West Asian/South Asian history so there might be more direct real-world parallels here than I realize.)
On another level of reviewing entirely, I kinda feel like a threesome would fix everything, pls consider that, main character people.
Oh, and! How many "City of" book titles can we come up with? "City of Gold and Lead", of course; Cassie Clare's Cities of Bones/Ashes/Glass/Fallen Angels/Lost Souls/Heavenly Fire, which I had to look up because I never read more than the first three; City of Ember; City of Stairs. Looks like there's a historical mystery City of Silver. I predict that the next one of these will not be called City of, to avoid sounding like the Clare books; it'll be something like "The Fire Above The Water" or something else more figurative than a specific place or item.
Sometimes I play a mental game with myself of "what did this get compared to in the pitch" (similar but slightly different to my "you will like this if" reviewing), and I think there's a good chance that this one mentioned Game of Thrones... there's a lot of factions and intrigue and longstanding ethnic conflicts and secrets, etc. We start out in Napoleon-era Egypt, but rapidly get into a separate fantasy society, so we can have all those politics and grudges without as much real-world baggage. (Although I also don't know that much West Asian/South Asian history so there might be more direct real-world parallels here than I realize.)
On another level of reviewing entirely, I kinda feel like a threesome would fix everything, pls consider that, main character people.
Oh, and! How many "City of" book titles can we come up with? "City of Gold and Lead", of course; Cassie Clare's Cities of Bones/Ashes/Glass/Fallen Angels/Lost Souls/Heavenly Fire, which I had to look up because I never read more than the first three; City of Ember; City of Stairs. Looks like there's a historical mystery City of Silver. I predict that the next one of these will not be called City of, to avoid sounding like the Clare books; it'll be something like "The Fire Above The Water" or something else more figurative than a specific place or item.
no subject
Date: 2018-03-01 01:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-03-01 06:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-03-01 06:06 pm (UTC)Also I just want to record somewhere my analysis that Dara corresponds to the id, Nahri is the ego, and Ali is the superego. I don't have any prediction about what this should mean for the next book though.