The Kingdom of Copper

The Kindgom of Copper

By S.A. Chakraborty

Nahri’s life changed forever the moment she accidentally summoned Dara, a formidable, mysterious djinn, during one of her schemes. Whisked from her home in Cairo, she was thrust into the dazzling royal court of Daevabad—and quickly discovered she would need all her grifter instincts to survive there.

Now, with Daevabad entrenched in the dark aftermath of a devastating battle, Nahri must forge a new path for herself. But even as she embraces her heritage and the power it holds, she knows she’s been trapped in a gilded cage, watched by a king who rules from the throne that once belonged to her family—and one misstep will doom her tribe...

Meanwhile, Ali has been exiled for daring to defy his father. Hunted by assassins, adrift on the unforgiving copper sands of his ancestral land, he is forced to rely on the frightening abilities the marid—the unpredictable water spirits—have gifted him. But in doing so, he threatens to unearth a terrible secret his family has long kept buried.

And as a new century approaches and the djinn gather within Daevabad's towering brass walls for celebrations, a threat brews unseen in the desolate north. It’s a force that would bring a storm of fire straight to the city’s gates . . . and one that seeks the aid of a warrior trapped between worlds, torn between a violent duty he can never escape and a peace he fears he will never deserve.

There should be a quiz every time I read a book like this: What crucial information have I forgotten from the previous book in the series to the next? In this case, it would be: most the the climax, and DEFINITELY THE PART WHERE SHE GOT MARRIED.  Haha, what? I read that and I almost spit-taked (spittook?), I was like, arrrruuu??? And then we just skipped merrily five years into the future anyway, so I got over it.  As you do.  I mean, I had a lot of time to get over it, because this book was also six hundred pages.  Not that I don't love a chunky nugget, but for real, a lot of that could have been cut out, because we did not get to the juicy action part for like, hundreds of pages.

All of my poor memorization of previous novels aside, I did end up getting into Kingdom of Copper.  I did struggle at the beginning obviously, trying to figure out who was who all over again, and how we left things (re-reading books is for the WEAK and also I'm lazy) but also, a lot of it is kinda needlessly confusing.  For example, djinn and daeva are used interchangeably sometimes, but also it is made clear that they are not the same thing - but then what they are is not explained? I feel legitimately like really dumb about some of this.  In the end-notes, they're going on about tribes, and like, the Geziri are all a tribe, but the Nahid are...not?  And the Daeva are Nahid supporters, but also Daeva is another word for djinn, except that like, the Geziri don't consider themselves Daeva?  I sound like I'm having a goddamn stroke.

Anyway, I never really understood that part in the first book, The City of Brass, either, so I guess it's okay if I still don't quite get it here.  Like The Wicked King, I definitely felt like this book improved upon the first.  Although it was incredibly slow to start (I was not joking about cutting a few hundred pages) when it did pick up, it was very exciting, and fun to see it all coming together.  I have no idea why we skipped five years in the first chapter, that was silly.  It makes the timing of everything somewhat handwavy - like, Nahri discovers an old hospital at the same time five years later that Ali comes back and Manizheh is ready to make her move?  Girl, if you say so. 

I did appreciate that Nahri was separated from both Ali and Darayavahoush for most of the story - honestly, I never felt like her attachment to Dara was fairly earned.  He just picked her up and whisked her off in City of Brass, and while, yes, she may have felt she was otherwise surrounded by a sea of enemies in Daevabad, it never felt right that a streetwise con artist wouldn't be more suspicious of him.  I hope that they don't end up together (dare to dream!). And Ali has a big old pole up his butt, no offense. I did enjoy seeing someone who was passionate about helping people and outspoken just constantly  fucking up because no one else wants to help people, read the room, Ali.

There is a lot of thought given to historical inequities.  One of the major themes throughout was the suppression of the Shafit, which are the half-blooded djinni who get, like, collected? And have to stay in Daevabad because they can't be trusted outside in the world even though other djinn can go anywhere they want? I mean, you don't get half human Shafit babies without djinn gone wild, is what I'm saying.  The horse has done left that barn, no point in locking the doors now.

Also, there's some weird thing going on with the Daeva that I never really figured out.  Like, no one likes them, but also the Wazir is Daeva?  I don't know if a more comprehensive knowledge of Middle Eastern and Southern Asian politics and history would have helped me here.  Like our current world, the reason why things are the way they are isn't always logical or linear, but the difference is that the real world doesn't give a shit if you believe in it or not, it's here, and it's not going anywhere.  A fantasy book needs more internal logic than that, otherwise you have trouble keeping your readers' heads in the game.

Don't get me wrong, I really did like it, on its own, and as a sequel to City of Brass.  The setting is (pardon the pun) magical, and the characters, plotting, scenery and magical abilities are both unique and engrossing.  [Too many plots though! In addition the ones corked up by our focus group, there's also at least one fake Shafit uprising and one real one.  It's a little much.] I will eagerly await the third.  And just in case I need a refresher at that point: Muntadhir sacrificed himself for Ali and Nahri, and was poisoned, but then came back to life when magic disappeared, Nahri gave the city's ring to Ali, but they somehow got pulled from the lake to the Nile, and wound up by Cairo.  Phew!

26: A Book That's Published In 2019

I'll Be Gone In The Dark

I'll Be Gone In The Dark

By Michelle McNamara

For more than ten years, a mysterious and violent predator committed fifty sexual assaults in Northern California before moving south, where he perpetrated ten sadistic murders. Then he disappeared, eluding capture by multiple police forces and some of the best detectives in the area.

Three decades later, Michelle McNamara, a true crime journalist who created the popular website TrueCrimeDiary.com, was determined to find the violent psychopath she called "the Golden State Killer." Michelle pored over police reports, interviewed victims, and embedded herself in the online communities that were as obsessed with the case as she was.

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark—the masterpiece McNamara was writing at the time of her sudden death—offers an atmospheric snapshot of a moment in American history and a chilling account of a criminal mastermind and the wreckage he left behind. It is also a portrait of a woman’s obsession and her unflagging pursuit of the truth. Utterly original and compelling, it has been hailed as a modern true crime classic—one which fulfilled Michelle's dream: helping unmask the Golden State Killer.

In looking for a posthumous book, it would be hard to find one with an odder story than this one: published in January 2018, two years after Michelle McNamara dies, having spent years on a decades-old cold case, in April 2018 a suspect is arrested and charged for a string of more than 50 rapes and 12 murders stretching over fifteen towns.

I'll Be Gone starts promisingly and thoughfully, as McNamara talks about needing empathy in order to write about true crime without being lurid or morbid or unfairly brutal to its survivors, victims, and their families.  I think that her empathy is strength of the book, and it shines most clearly in the early chapters, which walk us through several of the crimes.  The downside sadly, is the unfinished premise: the lack of finality or cohesiveness saps vitality in the later chapters.  Obviously McNamara knew an open-ended true crime mystery was a hard sell: the last chapter, completed by several others who assisted and worked with her, mentions her planned strategy for resolution.  But without her to actually write it, it comes off only half-formed.

The other issue I had with it is something else which may or may not be the author's fault: the seemingly random and non-chronological order of events and chapters.  It moves from rapes to murders and back without any real rhyme or reason, making the patterns that McNamara talks about harder to pin down or follow.  For example, a discussion about "escalation" (i.e., the idea of moving from solo women to couples and from rapes to murders indicates a committed step into riskier and more brutal crimes) loses potency since we as readers can't follow the escalating steps that the criminal took, switchbacking as we do.  I'm not sure if there was a reason for why the chapters are ordered the way that they are, but a more orderly chronological path would go a long ways towards clarity. And I hate to sound uncaring, but because the crimes did escalate the way they did, there would be constant and maintained tension through the entire book, not just the first half.

This book also comes in the midst of a broader examination of how we, the public, consume these stories: for entertainment, titillation, thrills, satisfaction, or what-have-you.  The recent Ted Bundy films (one a documentary, the other a fictionalized retelling from a bystander's point of view), the Serial podcast and its various offshoots and copycats, all of this implicates us.  What steps are we taking to ensure that these terrible crimes are treated appropriately in their re-tellings?  What is appropriate? Who has the right to these stories? And the popular ethical question right now: what do we owe each other?  I've been reading various true-crime books for years, and while I'm not taking on cold files as a personal hobby, it can become easy to lose sight of the individuals in a blur of faces while the focus falls onto the criminal. 

McNamara wrestled with this idea as well, acknowledging the morbid and macabre side to what was basically a hobby (an obsessive one, clearly) for her.  Even as she acknowledges it though, she's picking up case files from contacts she met in chatrooms, going through old yearbooks and buying strangers' jewelry on ebay, the modern equivalent to peeking in windows and reading other people's mail. At what point is this too much? Does intent matter? Nowadays, the idea of being a thoughtful consumer is gaining more traction. What obligations do we have to avoid exploitative works?

As for the capper to the story, the arrest and identification of a DNA match - it's odd, after reading I'll Be Gone, it seems too easy somehow. After all the evidence, all the manpower, in the end it just took an internet database, and all these (amateur and professional) sleuths changed nothing - time, and scientific advances, accomplished that which hours and years of dedication could not.


13: A Book Published Posthumously

The Wicked King

The Wicked King

By Holly Black

After the jaw-dropping revelation that Oak is the heir to Faerie, Jude must keep her younger brother safe. To do so, she has bound the wicked king, Cardan, to her, and made herself the power behind the throne. Navigating the constantly shifting political alliances of Faerie would be difficult enough if Cardan were easy to control. But he does everything in his power to humiliate and undermine her even as his fascination with her remains undiminished.

When it becomes all too clear that someone close to Jude means to betray her, threatening her own life and the lives of everyone she loves, Jude must uncover the traitor and fight her own complicated feelings for Cardan to maintain control as a mortal in a Faerie world.

I think this second book vastly improved upon the first.  It took out everything I didn't enjoy about the first book - the murky motivations, the lengthy character list, the lack of direction - and streamlined everything and put this story in MOTION.

The first book suffered from too-much-setup-ishness.  After reading The Wicked King, it's almost like this was the book she started with, and then went back and tried to fill in the blanks with Cruel Prince.  In Cruel Prince, I could never figure out why Jude even wanted to stay in Faerie - her parents had been murdered, she was cruelly humiliated and out-classed in faerie talents, her oldest sister was hell-bent on leaving.  There just didn't seem to be anything there for her, and her unwillingness to leave even as she complained over and over again of the horrible way she was treated was legit confusing. Plus, there were about five too many plots and machinations.  It never really gelled until the last few chapters when Jude decides to get her little brother on the throne as safely as possible.

So Wicked King really deals with all that head-on: Jude has a simple, clear, and logical goal: Keep Cardan on the straight and narrow until she can figure out how to get a long term plan in place for Oak, and everything else follows from that.

Even the relationship between Jude and Cardan feels more natural (well, as natural as a mortal teenager and faerie prince with a tail can be, I suppose).   I appreciated him starting to self-actualize (shout out to Lilly Moscovitz!) and scheme a little scheme himself by the end of the book.  It definitely is tropey to have Jude and Cardan assume the other isn't as into them, even as they deliberately push each other away, but the warm 'n' fuzzies it generates is why these are tropes in the first place.

The other thing I enjoyed much more about Wicked King is that the time spent with various characters feels more balanced: we spend a lot of time with Cardan and develop that relationship, we get away from Lorne and Jude's sister, who is in this baffling semi-abusive relationship and intent on marrying this guy even though she doesn't seem to like anything about him. For real, if you have to ask your sister to ask the king to keep a lid on your fiance's partying, CALL THE WEDDING OFF. Like, there is literally nothing appealing about Lorne, so his chick-magnetism is doubly crazy.

All in all, I'm looking forward to the third book, and I'm even considering re-reading the first in light of my warmer attitude about the second.  See, this is why I put a moratorium on starting series that weren't finished last year, and it was very refreshing, and then you get a couple of books as gifts and you wind up knee-deep in cliff-hanging sequels.

11: A Book With An Item Of Clothing Or Accessory On The Cover

Awaken Online: Catharsis

Awaken Online: Catharsis

By Travis Bagwell

Jason logs into Awaken Online fed-up with reality. He's in desperate need of an escape, and this game is his ticket to finally feeling the type of power and freedom that are so sorely lacking in his real life.

Awaken Online is a brand new virtual reality game that just hit the market, promising an unprecedented level of immersion. Yet Jason quickly finds himself pushed down a path he didn't expect. In this game, he isn't the hero. There are no damsels to save. There are no bad guys to vanquish.

In fact, he might just be the villain.

Ah, I too know the pain of stumbling into in-game villainy.  Once upon a time, my boyfriend was playing Red Dead Redemption, but, getting bored, fell asleep, allowing me to take control.  Little did he know I would awake him twenty minutes later, on the run from the law and desperate for help.  I'd managed to steal a stagecoach, run over some people and get a little infamous without much trouble at all, although I was not really capable of sustained infamy, as it required more hand-eye coordination and knowledge of the controls if I wanted to actually... live.

This was one of the prompts I was most dreading, because I have never read any LitRPG and was trolling the GoodReads message boards looking for suggestions and they, by and large, sounded - terrible, like just awful.  This one had good reviews, but wasn't available at the library, so I did actually pay money for this experience, and I have to admit, I was very pleasantly surprised!  This is, again, something that you have to take on its own terms, as it's never going to win a prize for writing, but it's an action-packed, somewhat humourous take on what happens when you kinda sorta fall into villainy and discover a hidden talent for it.  I'm even more impressed, upon further investigation, to find out the author, Travis Bagwell, is an international tax attorney, not a field well known for its erudite and creative minds.

But all that being said, I had a good time reading this!  It wasn't perfect, and there were a lot of threads that were introduced without any real resolution in this book (I assume because the sequels were already planned) but at least once, something that had made no sense was actually explained as a logical action (i.e., the game wasn't shut down after repeated notifications that the AI was making under the table changes and accessing people's memories because a board member pushed it through hard to help his sociopathic son).  Some of the characters were definitely over the top - I mean, the reveal that Alex actually regularly murdered small animals and was not merely a garden variety dickhole was a real surprise.

And that's I think the book is weakest.  Instead of just making Jason kind of emo and sad-sacky like most teenagers are, Bagwell like legit gave him a sociopathic enemy and had his parents literally kick him out of the house, which - what? I didn't necessarily need Jason to be justified in his anger to like him, in fact, I think it would have been much more realistic if Jason had realized that he, too, had overreacted and allowing the game to become an outlet for him made him more patient in the real world.

But despite what I said about logical motives up above, this book was not really aiming for realism - all three pivotal characters in the game were played by three kids who went to the same school?  Time is a little tricky too - even though Jason has more free time because he's been kicked out of school (and ostensibly re-enrolls somewhere else, although he never goes in the book) school never interferes with anyone's playing time - not Jason, Riley, or Alex.

I've got to wrap this up, since I'm getting too far behind on my reviews.  More books, fewer reviews!  I still haven't decided if I'll be reading the next ones in the series.  If they're on sale ($$) I think I would.  Alternatively, if I have to keep reading just to stay current with my boyfriend, who just started Catharsis' audiobook version (review not forthcoming on this blog) I would do it.  So far the books we've both read include: Watership Down and The Magicians series - so we're about due for another set.  I've tried to suggest Murderbot, as those are great, but sadly, Ms. Wells price per novella structure is a bit offputting.

45: A LitRPG Book