book.dreamblog’s Book Reviews!

The Daevabad Trilogy Books 3 and 4: The Empire of Gold and The River of Silver (by S.A. Chakraborty) *Warning: This review contains spoilers* The Empire of Gold Wow. Simply that much must be said. Because this series absolutely blew me away.  A large portion of my feelings about the final book in the Daevabad Trilogy , The Empire of Gold , are similar to my feelings about the second book. It captivated me from start to finish, and I plowed through it. I loved the lore, the politics, I loved the characters and their arcs.  Actually, the character arcs for all three of our protagonists were definitely the highlight of this entire novel.  First, starting with Alizayd. I greatly enjoyed the exploration with the other half of his heritage and Marid roots, which allows him water-based powers rather than fire-based powers, which are the custom of Daevabad. It tied perfectly into his miraculous survival of going into the lake earlier in the series. While it was difficult to accep...

The Deavabad Trilogy Book Two: The Kingdom of Copper by S.A. Chakraborty  *Warning: This review contains spoilers*  Summary & Review  Ok, so when I say that I devoured this book, I mean, I literally devoured it. My hardcover copy of The Kingdom of Copper is 600 pages long, and I read it in approximately two sittings. I should specify, I don’t actually read at lightning speed. I love reading, and for that reason, I like to savor reading. I read slow. But I was physically incapable of reading The Kingdom of Copper slowly because I was just so invested in what would happen next with every chapter I read. There aren’t a lot of series that exist where I feel that the second book was an improvement over the first. These instances are rare, and The Daevabad Trilogy is one of those rare instances. I had issues with the initial pacing of the first book (though it picked up quite a bit during the second half), but this book didn’t have any of those issues for me. It was the pe...

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,...