The Daevabad Trilogy Review Part One: The City of Brass
The Daevabad Trilogy Book One: The City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty
*Warning: This review contains spoilers*
*Content Warning*
This review mentions genocide.
Summary & Review
I was not expecting to end up loving this book as much as I did. Towards the beginning of the book, I was quite underwhelmed by it, despite my high expectations. Nahri was a great protagonist right from the start (and remained so the whole trilogy), but there was just so much going on at the start of The City of Brass. It felt like a lot of info-dumping in places, with Dara's constant explaining about the history and lore of Daevabad and the key differences between Daevas and Djinn and Shafit to Nahri. Keeping track of the lore when it was only being told to me and not actually shown thus far in the story felt exhausting at times. On top of that, a lot of these early chapters were about Nahri and Dara journeying to Daevabad, and I'm not a huge fan of exclusive travel chapters in books, especially when it feels like that's all that's happening in those chapters: traveling and monologues of info-dumping. It happens a lot in fantasy books, I think, and for me, it always throws the pacing off. There were a few twists and turns, of course, during these chapters, but not enough of them to make them not feel explicitly like Travel Chapters (TM).
It was also excruciatingly obvious that Chakraborty was using these chapters for the purpose of bringing Nahri and Dara together romantically. I know that a lot of Daevabad fans really ship them, and I totally get the tropes behind their relationship, but it did feel rather forced to me in places. The whole relationship could have been better paced and built up more subtly, and I might have been a bit more on board with it from the start. Maybe. Actually, probably not. The thousand-year-old male love interest and the young-female-protagonist is one of my least favorite tropes in fantasy. I'll give Chakraborty some slack on it since Nahri is a twenty-something and not a teenager, so it's not as bad as other fantasy variations of this cliche, but it's still one of my least favorites.
Seriously, when is the last time anyone wrote or enjoyed the reverse of this trope? A thousand-year-old female love interest getting together with a twenty-something dude? I doubt most people who like the reverse would enjoy this, and so it's such a weird double standard.
Chakraborty also interjected Ali’s chapters and perspectives pretty early on in the first book. Obviously they become important later, and he actually becomes one of my favorite characters, but at first they seem a bit out of place because they aren’t connecting to the main story going on in Nahri’s chapters. It’s mostly just giving us a different point of view on the history and lore of Daevabad and setting things up for later.
It’s also obvious from a million miles away that it’s going to end up being a Nahri/Dara/Ali love triangle. In fact, before the characters ever even crossed paths, I knew this was going to happen. And surprisingly enough, I actually enjoy the direction this goes in later books—given that I am not usually into the love triangle trope because I find it to be a very cliche trope for YA/NA fiction.
So yeah, the entire beginning of the book is a recipe for what makes up most run-of-the-mill, mediocre YA books…. And then it got so, so good.
Once you get to the point where you finally know all the lore and the two storylines (Nahri/Dara’s and Ali’s) finally come together, the plot actually really amps up and becomes amazing, with its complex characters, political strife, and world building. It really becomes a well-oiled machine with all the different wheels turning in just the perfect ways to keep me reading. It took me weeks to read the first 100 pages, and one sitting to finish the entire rest of the book. The side characters are also really amazing in this book—both Ali’s siblings Muntadhir and Zaynab, as well as Jamshid. (By the way, I totally 100% called the foreshadowing for the Muntadhir/Jamshid romance way early into the book, convinced myself I was being too hopeful for LGBT rep, then screamed out loud during the epilogue when I found out I was right the whole time). While our main protagonists remained the characters I personally resonated with the most, I was deeply invested in the side characters as well. And I think that’s hard for a lot of authors to pull off—many books are either great MC’s with side characters who feel extraneous, or the side characters steal the show from the protagonist. But Chakraborty keeps the right balance of making me invest with all of them.
One of the things I adored the absolute most about this book, and the series as a whole, is the way that Chakraborty handles the nuances of prejudice and how corrupt societies thrive off prejudices at a systemic level. It’s not portrayed as just a simple black-and-white divide in who is prejudiced and who receives the prejudice. There are more layers. The Djinn have a deep-seated religious prejudice against Daevas and use the term “fire-worshippers” as a derogatory against them, and the Daevas are very much forced to live as social outcasts in a city that once belonged to their people and was stolen from them. But the Daevas themselves also push a xenophobic prejudice against Shafit (half human, half Djinn). They refer to Shafit as “dirtbloods” and see them and literal lesser beings because of their supposed “impure” bloodlines. And the later books also explore the way those who are Ayanle are discriminated against for their darker complexions and cultural affinity for water--being referred to cruelly as "crocodiles." But the specific imbalance of power and prejudice amongst the Djinn, the Daevas, the Shafits, and the Ayanle is a great example of how experiencing prejudice against you for one thing doesn't automatically absolve you from exhibiting it towards someone else for something different. And that leads to the way it shows how ending prejudice entirely requires awareness of intersectionality in the prejudices against differing groups. This all adds another layer of complexity to Nahri's character too, as she is both Shafit and Daeva, and she has to learn to balance the differing aspects of her heritages and cultures that have historically not interacted well with one another in the past.
It is also politically interesting because of the way that the dynamics of power struggle among the different cultural and ethnic groups within Daevabad always seem to benefit Ghassan--the true villain of the book--and keep him and his family in power.
It also brings me to the complexity of the character of Dara...
Dara is often considered a beloved character in this series by most fans, and by all accounts, I do consider him to be quite a complex and interesting character. But there are some darker aspects to his character that are worth picking apart. On one end, Dara is a Daeva and the reader gets to see many ways in which he was outcasted because of it, and what the legendary figure Zaydi al Qahtani did to his sister was an absolute atrocity. That being said, what Dara did in his past was also an inexcusable atrocity too.
We learn at a certain point in the first book that Dara committed a genocide of countless Shafit in the city of Qui-Zi hundreds of years ago during his rebellion against Zaydi al Qahtani (the Djinn who conquered Daevabad from Dara's people), and it earned Dara the nickname in lore of "the Scourge." While I'll never defend Zaydi al Qahtani, his conquest, or his war crimes. Obviously he's the worst, but Dara is also kind of the worst too, and I won't defend what he did either. It was literal genocide; he targeted a specific ethnic group in a war and slaughtered countless of them because of their ethnicity. Just because later Dara realizes it was wrong doesn't make it not a genocide.
The entire time I was reading, I was honestly waiting for the twist where Chakraborty revealed that Dara didn't actually do it. He was framed, the context was skewed, it was for the "greater good," he was manipulated and lied to be someone worse, or some other fantasy cliche like that, which often get used to make awful things look slightly less awful in the eyes of the readers who have come to fall in love with the character. But as The City of Brass continues, it becomes increasingly clear that that is not the case. Dara did, in fact, do what history remembers he did, and it is just as awful and horrific as what the histories remember, and worst of all, Nahri has to learn to reconcile the Dara she's come to know with the truth of who he was in the past.
Some readers may not be keen on the fact that Chakraborty chose not to cushion the truth of who Dara is--primarily because of the fact that we'd already gotten to know and enjoy his characters, and a lot of readers do not like when the characters they have become attached to become morally hard to swallow. Also, I suspect, because Dara was enslaved by the Ifrit, and so most readers feel bad for him right from the start. Personally, however, I actually liked the angle that Chakraborty took with Dara. For one thing, she avoided a fantasy genre cliche by not retconning the context of what Dara did, and also, it's a way for her to not water down the horror of war crimes. By leaving the truth of what Dara did as gruesome as the readers were told early on, she's essentially avoiding saying to her readers, "here's why it's not actually as bad as it seems!" Chakraborty is standing firmly in the "actually, no, this was a war crime, and it is as horrible as it seems."
I don't necessarily think this means that fans can't enjoy Dara's character though. He goes through a reckoning with his past mistakes in this trilogy, and he learns to accept that what he did was not okay. It especially shows through in the friendship that he develops with Nahri, which forces him to (finally) understand that Shafit are not lesser beings like he has been taught his entire life to believe. And also, it is completely possible to have empathy and understanding for someone's situation without supporting their behavior. We empathize with Dara in his past enslavement because no one deserves to be enslaved, and we understand how years of prejudice against him have made him the person he is. But that empathy and understanding of who Dara is doesn't mean condoning his genocide in Qui-Zi. For me, as a reader, it means that I just want to make sure the political strife and war and prejudices and social divides in the universe of Daevabad are ended, so that no one else ever gets socialized into becoming a war criminal like Dara, and so that no one else becomes enslaved like him either.
It is because of Dara's past, however, that I firmly stood against Nahri and Dara ending up together romantically. I know that makes me the minority in the Daevabad fandom, as most fans were rooting for these two to finally find their way back to each other. I'm sorry, but I just couldn't stand behind it. No matter the bond the two developed together in what they went through in Daevabad, and no matter how Dara's views on Shafit changed, nothing was going to change the fact that Dara was always going to be the person responsible for the genocide of Nahri's ethnic group. She's Shafit as much as she's Daeva. Dara will absolutely always mean a lot to Nahri personally, and she's always going to know a version of him who is different than the version that most knew, but it's best for them both if they don't end up in a romantic relationship.
And I just have to say, nothing could have prepared me for the intensity of the last couple of chapters of this book. Wow. It was such an accomplishment to make such a relatively small conflict (Dara's jealousy of the growing friendship between Nahri and Ali) blow up into something so much bigger. I was literally glued to the pages during the last 100 pages of this book.
There may be debate amongst fans in their interpretation of who is to blame for the events that come: Dara or Ali. Was it Ali's fault for not telling Nahri right away that Dara was walking himself into a trap, or was it Dara's fault for essentially kidnapping the two of them in the first place? I guess, in all fairness, everything that ensues is the result of both of their choices, but I tend not to blame Ali for making the decision he did too much. Dara was basically forcing him to come with him, and it was blatantly obvious that Nahri didn't want to leave Daevabad with Dara in that moment either; she capitulated in going with him to try and stop Dara from causing any more damage. It's only one small step removed from a hostage situation, so if walking Dara into a trap was the best way Ali could think to help get himself out of that situation, I can't find it in myself to blame him for that. I think a lot of folks would make the same call. It's just that doing so ended up having more dire consequences than what Ali could have predicted. Obviously, that's different in Nahri's perspective because she's not an impartial party observing the events unfolding. She's close to Dara, so it's completely natural and understanding that she ends up angry with Ali over what happened. I just, personally, am not.
Also, my mind was too blown to be angry at anyone anyway.
I screamed out loud when Ali went into the lake. I honestly thought he was dead for sure, and I was devastated because I was really growing to like his character by this point in the novel, and I was about to call it a waste to kill him off just as he was starting to develop. And then he survived, and I absolutely did not see it coming at all. Nice twist, Chakraborty. You got me this time. This has such a great lead in the future subplots in books two and three about the Marid, but that discussion is for the next review!
Final Thoughts
My rating for The City of Brass, first book in the Daevabad Trilogy, is 4 stars out of 5. It gets off to a very slow start, and you may find yourself struggling to get into it, but once you get through the beginning, it is so worth it. It is the start of an absolutely breathtaking series.
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