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This is the second book in SA Chakraborty's Daevabad trilogy. This is a strong book two for a fantasy trilogy, and I quite enjoyed it. Rather than just Nahri and Ali being the sole point of view characters, this book also brings in a third perspective that adds some more insight into outside events. I love that Ali gets some space to find new friends and discover a little more about what's important to him. Nahri really comes into her own as well.

The weakest part of this book for me are that the antagonists seem increasingly flat. I wish there had been some point of view chapters (even just one or two) from Ghassan the king to understand the incredibly horrific things that he both does and threatens to do.

If anything, I just wanted more from this book, although that's probably just a sign that I really enjoyed it.

It's definitely a weighty fantasy tome with a fairly small cast, but I still wanted to hear more about peripheral characters, especially Zaynab and Aqisa who are off page a good bit of the book. Honestly, my favorite (but also infuriating) non-pov character in this book was Muntadhir. He goes through such dramatic but believable shifts over the course of the book, not just in his relationship with Nahri but also with his sibling Ali. The tonal shift between Muntadhir's petty archery competition, the sibling argument in a closet afterwards, and then finally the heroism archery parallel at the end is just chef's kiss.

City of Brass is the first book in SA Chakraborty's Daevabad medieval Muslim fantasy trilogy. The premise is that an Egyptian thief with mysterious healing powers accidentally summons a warrior djinn; it turns out she is the last of a race of Nahid djinn and is whisked away to a hidden city of Daevabad where she is immediately embroiled in politics.

What I enjoyed the most out of this book was the multilayered and dynamic political and personal tensions. The current Geziri rulers destroyed the previous Nahid/Daeva rulers, now living as ~second class citizens in Daevabad. The historical (and present) conflict between them revolves around Shafit half-djinn who are both required to live in Daevabad and also forced to live in squalor. For me, this is fantasy politics at its best where everybody's grievances and actions are understandable and often there's no good answers.

The two alternating perspectives of this book are from Nahri (the aforementioned Egyptian thief) with her warrior djinn Dara (who is loathed by Geziri and celebrated by Daeva), and the second Geziri prince Ali (stuck up, rule bound, named after Dara's mortal enemy, supports Shafit to the consternation of his father the king and his older brother heir). All of this leads to complicated and messy interactions between the whole cast, where the backdrop of history tinges every relationship.

The start of the book was a bit rocky for me, and had a lot of what felt like info-dumping by Dara on their way to Daevabad. On top of that, it took me a little bit to digest all the different djinn races and fit that into the slow historical reveals. That said, once everything got going, the relationships and politics were great fun to read and the ending really landed a good climax with intriguing developments for the next book.

(I read this because it was off of the #SFFBookClub's backlog, and also because of screamsbeneath's review of the whole series.)

This is a fantasy tome that follows Laney Stones, a necromancer who is allergic to violence. So allergic that she gets echo injuries of anything she sees, and breaks out in hives if people discuss violence that has (or is intended) to happen. The book starts off with both of her parents dead and Laney writing to her overbearing sister to come back and help with debt on the house.

I love that the book is long enough for Laney to grow up through many different roles; I think my favorite bits were her becoming (more or less) a parent to her niece, and also learning to be a waitress (and have friends) after a childhood of solitude.

The tone of this book really carries it. The entire Stones family has fabulous names. The protagonist is Laney Stones (short for Miscellaneous Immiscible Stones), daughter of Unnatural "Natty" Stones and Abandon Hope Stones. It's got whimsical footnotes, often for unnecessary humorous detail about historical people and places. Here's one footnote example from p. 210 to give you a taste, although I could have picked any of a dozen:

Extramundane Stones, much to Irradiant's dismay, had taken his name all too literally. The only Stones to voluntarily leave Liriat upon attaining his majority, Mundy had shortened his forename and changed his surname to suggest ironically the one by which his august father most often addressed him. He had then moved to Leech and married a goose girl. Mundy thereafter lived out a prosperous four score and three years growing prize vegetables. His wife, Mistress Mudclopper, having been briefed on Mundy's family history, elected not to have children. Both Mudcloppers died content. The Stoneses never spoke of them.

I hesitate to pin this book's narrative style down on a map, but I would say that this book lies in a neighboring country to both Terry Pratchett and T. Kingfisher's fantasy books. Even if there are many funny parts and wry narrative asides to this book, the world itself takes itself seriously (and does not seem to be a disc on elephants). Even though there's a few different fantasy countries here with politics and history and views on magic, I feel like it's still largely a character-driven novel with a small cast.

There's some good potential setup here for the next book, and I'm excited to see where that goes.

A dysfunctional team of four conwomen (the boss, the hacker, the distraction, and the driver) get caught and imprisoned in Justice, an ancient spaceship whose AI goes around collecting tithes of prisoners to run it; despite their fraying relationships, the four of them have to find their footing in the cultures and towns that are flourishing on the ship, escape the eyes and hands of the AI, and run one more con to escape the ship together.

Genre-wise, there's a lot of "low tech" here, such that it almost felt like a fantasy book of towns, swords, and politics but on a space-ship. It reminded me a good bit of Elizabeth Bear's Jacob's Ladder books.

The character dynamics really drove the book. Murdock (the hacker) is the first person perspective here; her main goal is to prove herself to Hark (the boss), and she has an icy relationship with Fitz (the distraction) because of Fitz's attention from Hark. From the get go, the Justice AI creepily sticks its nose into these relationships and tries to win Murdock over to its side. The book revolves around all of these shifting relationships.

Overall, this was a fun romp if you want some conwomen spaceship escape adventures.

The Jasad Heir is the first book in a series filled with fantasy politics and an enemies-to-potential-lovers relationship. It follows Sylvia, the heir to the destroyed kingdom of Jasad, who is in hiding but ends up being captured by Arin, the heir to the anti-magic (cop) kingdom that destroyed Jasad; Arin chooses her as his champion for the upcoming tournament, where being the winner may get her the freedom she deserves and help Arin with his own political ends. Shenanigans.

There's some stuff going on here I like. There's some tasty uncertainty about historical events and about the characters themselves that I enjoy--Sylvia's own point of view about Jasad is balanced out by extra perspectives later that possibly (but not certainly) Jasad was not the pure victim that Sylvia wants to imagine they are. And on top of that, there's a good bit of unreliable narration going on where Sylvia can't trust her own memories. I also enjoyed the way the tournament plot and the political intrigue came together for the third trial in a satisfying way.

However, in thinking back on this book, there was a lot that didn't work. The various countries felt pretty flat. I (personally) could do without another tournament arc for the rest of my life. The political machinations were interesting, but it felt like there was some missing personal context for Sylvia's relationship with people from her past that could have made some of it feel more impactful.

FINALLY, and this is the big one, but... I don't know that I really buy the burgeoning relationship between Sylvia and Arin. Sure sure, there's certainly plenty of tense heated conversations where Arin is trying to catch Sylvia in a lie and Sylvia is trying to get as much information as possible without revealing anything she doesn't mean to. However, Sylvia is literally being captured and blackmailed by her arch nemesis and she is pretty traumatized about being touched. I can understand the level of mutual respect the two of them develop over time, and I can understand some softening when they each understand that the other isn't the monster they assumed, but anything more than that felt jarring to me. The embrace before the third trial felt awkwardly out of place especially.

Maybe enemies-to-lovers just isn't for me, but I need to be convinced more on why a particular relationship works when it's between two traumatized people who have plenty of reasons to hate each other.

I've been looking forward to reading this since the authors essay on the subject matter was released on tor.com (I highly reccomend the essay). This is absolutely a book that will stay with me for a long time and one that is worth a slow burn, or if you're like me and can't put it down, then a re-read. It was devastatingly beautiful, brutally human.

The most fascinating and compelling aspect of the book for me was the interplay between the relationships: to the multitudes of inner selves and their relation and manifestation to other selves l, and to the feedback loop that exists with all social interaction. This is a story about how we relate to others (no matter their embodiment), and how those relations are influenced by our own perspective and habituated behaviors. It's also about so many other things that are best discovered first hand.

The sheer amount of depth and nuance in such a small space is a work of art and I'm sure a result of much painstaking effort. There is a beautiful economy of words, that when constellated, emerge as something entirely new.

The author's notes of this book pitch it as Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles meets True Grit, which I think is quite accurate. If I had to sum up the premise, it's "shitty teen blackmails local fuckup to help her recover a stolen recording of her mother through a journey across a desert filled with weird horror".

The Mars of this book feels very much like an extension of the American west. Here, the first Mars landing was in 1864, there's some wars with Germans over territory (a WW1 analog?), and folks are mining and settling Mars when this book takes place in 1931. This book doesn't concern itself with things like breathable atmosphere or domes, and instead is much more vibes-based about Martian dirt. When a spacesuit does show up it's a classic horror element rather than anything about breathable air. (In some ways this retro future conceit reminds me of Malka Older's The Mimicking of Known Successes where despite being a space city on Jupiter, it feels like a direct extension of Sherlock's foggy London.)

I enjoyed this even as I found the protagonist Annabelle a bit insufferable, and the vibes-based space science a little hard to wrap my brain around. I particularly enjoyed the horror elements (ghost gardens! angry war machines! possessed space suit!) and the retro robots whose programming is on physical cylinders that are inserted and removed from them. I also love a good abandoned colony story too.

(Also, here's a few other content warned thoughts.)