As a whole, I liked City of Brass.

It suffers from a case of having a weak first half – never a good thing but especially dangerous for debut authors. It starts off awfully slowly and despite having two points of view, very little is accomplished. The main character, Nahri’s POV alternates between mountains of exposition regarding the djinn world, clans, culture and her attempting to be cool whenever Dara breathes nearby. Ali’s chapters consist of him being reminded repeatedly that the systemic djinn caste culture is pretty terrible and that he will be the king’s advisor when his older brother receives the crown. Nothing else really happens for the first 250 pages. A lack of story doesn’t inherently bother me, but if it’s the case there needs to be something else to hook the reader like moreish prose or introspective character studies (neither of which were bad at all here but not so great as to specifically note).

I recommend powering through it as once Nahri and Dara arrive at the city of brass, it gets far more interesting. In particular, Dara clashing with and antagonising literally everyone was immensely enjoyable to read. I was a huge fan with Chakraborty’s careful creation of an incredibly morally grey world. It’s obvious that the djinn in charge are not exactly kind rulers to the lower castes but those that oppose them are pretty shitty people as well. This is reflected well in the characters also – Dara is critical of much of the city (and rightfully so, mostly) but he’s hardly a paragon what with his historical reputation. Ali, too, is pretty reasonable in that he wants to help the poor but then he turns around and shows how religiously zealous he is and how he looks down on basically everyone around him. It’s the same for every major character and faction and never feels like whiplash personality changes; every chapter I was switching my opinion on who to support, it was expertly done.

I kind of felt that the female characters were a bit lacking, unfortunately. Nahri is an excellent character who goes through significant development throughout the book and I’m interested to see where her story goes in the future. But the supporting cast is somewhat lacklustre. Zaynab has one scene where she shows her cards immediately and Nahri’s like ‘okay not gonna hang out with her again’ and then she’s barely seen. Nisreen is more consisntenly prominent but she doesn’t really do much except be disapproving up until the climax. I expect she’ll have a bigger part in the sequels, and I hope Zaynab does too; she was a great character that deserves more focus (especially after her one particular conversation with Ali).

Probably every review has mentioned this at some point, so I won’t linger, but I really appreciated the Arab-esque setting, particularly because it was clearly so well researched. Djinn are to Islamic folklore what Baba Yaga is to Slavic folklore – that is to say, when anyone dares write about something so ‘exotic’, they probably are only interested about including djinn. So, it was refreshing to see references to marids, peri, daeva and nahids.

I think this review reflects more negatively than how I feel. I didn’t love it as I had hoped but I did enjoy it as a whole. I like that it doesn’t try to hide its Arab inspirations, written by an author who clearly isn’t writing in the setting because its ‘ethnic’ but actually because they’re interested in and knowledgeable about it. I like the constant struggle Ali has between wanting to support his family and help the needy. I like how Nahri is put in a shit position but negotiates her way to the ‘optimal’ solution even if it’s not the happiest for her. While I don’t feel an urge to rush out to buy Kingdom of Copper, I’ve heard that it is better by those who loved City of Brass so I will certainly be reading it in the future.