Review: The City of Brass

The City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When Aimal Farooq told me this book exists, I was confuzzled because my friend Skies is working on a book of the same name and putting it up on Wattpad. But no, this book and Skies' book are most certainly not the same.

And given Aimal's penchant for scary djinn stories (the Aimal Specials, I call them), I absolutely needed this book yesterday. If my library hadn't ordered it in time for me to put a much-needed advance hold, I might've have to shed my usual Spidey- and/or Flash-personas and go full Oliver Queen on their asses.



But no, thankfully, I didn't.

And I'm very glad to have given The City of Brass, the first in this planned #ownvoices Muslim historical fantasy trilogy, my first official review of 2018. Really, it's more of a 4.5 for me because it tends to slow down in the middle or so, but the screaming cliffhanger ending and revelations, as well as the richly detailed world-building magnificence, and of course Nahri's and Ali's (albeit limited third-person) POVs livening things up and adding a certain amount of YA crossover appeal. Heck, this book's take on djinn and djinn tribes has made me look back at my old childhood favorite Children of the Lamp series, which now feels a little half-baked in comparison in terms of world-building. Chakraborty gives us so many tribes with their own unique rules and customs and powers and attributes, and while it's sometimes hard to keep track of all the factoids, it's just yet another testament to her superior writing ability that makes me go all-out with this five-star rating. That, plus how much the book's anti-bigotry themes resonate so strongly.

So far, all we know is that the second book will be called The Kingdom of Copper. And that I'm going to have to jump on ordering it as soon as my library allows me to. And that until then, I'm going to have to hand-sell this book to as many Stanford bookstore customers as possible.

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