I recently finished reading City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty. I started reading it for a readalong last December and… then I got distracted by a shiny — ooh, a book! — and I kept forgetting to get back to it. Don’t let the fact that I got distracted while reading this book deter you. I did like it.
Nahri is a young woman just trying to survive in old-timey Cairo. This isn’t an easy task, as you can imagine. She doesn’t have a family to fall back on, and she has become skilled as a con-artist in the process. Until she accidentally summons a djinn. Whoops.
From that point, her life will never be the same. The next thing you know, Nahri and the djinn are running away from monsters. They end up taking shelter in Daevabad, which seems like a good idea at first, but happens to be ruled by a monster of a different kind.
There’s a lot to this book, which makes the book both intriguing and… perhaps a little overwhelming.
First, City of Brass has quite an array of supernatural beings. Some of them I’m familiar with, like the djinn, but then there are many other tribes and cultures with different affinities, and it’s all really hard to keep track of. Then each culture has a rich history and… I certainly can’t remember it all. Never mind that I got distracted and went off and read a bunch of other books before finishing this one, I had trouble keeping this all in my head while I was reading it.
Then, there’s the court of Daevabad itself. There are rebels and the ruling family has its history and everybody is fighting against each other. It might not have been as difficult if I hadn’t already been trying to keep track of all the supernatural beings.
There is a bit of a love triangle with Nahri and the djinn that she ends up summoning and the younger prince. It’s not resolved in this book. I have my personal favorite that I’m rooting for, but I’ll have to read the next book to see what happens.
My guess is that this book is one that would be better upon a reread. While I enjoyed the book, I’m not sure if I liked it enough to reread it. The characters were interesting enough, but I didn’t feel a connection to them like I do in some of the books that I can reread over and over and over again.
So, while City of Brass is well-written and has an amazingly complex and intricate world, it didn’t end up being one that I’ll gush over for years to come. That’s mostly on me, not the book. If I would have felt more connection to the characters or been more familiar with the culture, I probably would have liked it more.