Kingdom of Copper improved upon an already interesting world.

I’m not usually a big fan of long time skips, I think they’re often used to forcibly create unknown information, BUT this book did an incredible job of acknowledging that time had passed without the time passage being the conflict. The characters were able to grow off page and return to the story more sure of themselves and their places in the world. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and think that it was a great choice!

This book brings in Dara as a POV character and for me, that was the hardest part of reading the book. I did not enjoy reading his chapters, and I usually would stop reading for the day once I got to a Dara chapter.

the chapters once he has realized how ruthless Manizheh is were even harder to read because he knows that she’s willing to hurt innocent people, he doesn’t like it, but he goes along with it anyway

I think that the pacing of this book worked much better than City of Brass. I also liked the fact that Nahri had grown into herself and had a lot more agency in this book. Her comfort with being the Banu Nahida was apparent, and her relationships with the other members of the palace felt believable given the years she had spent there as the wife to the Emir.

Ali had definitely grown a lot between books one and two, but his motivation felt a little weak to me.

I don’t fully understand where his shift in beliefs about the Daeva tribe came from. He went from hating their religion and their beliefs about the shafit to not seeming to care, and that shift felt like it came out of nowhere

My favorite non-POV characters have to be Jamshid and Zaynab. They both have so much gumption and a strong sense of who they are and where they fit in the world. It’s refreshing to see, especially given how much Nahri and Ali are changing their place in the world. I could talk about them forever, but this review is already getting long so I’m going to wrap it up here. I look forward to seeing how the trilogy concludes in Empire of Gold.

Style/writing: 4.5 stars
Themes: 4 stars
Characters: 4.5 stars
Plot: 4.5 stars
Worldbuilding: 4.5 stars

What a sequel! I found the pace a bit difficult this time round, as it’s such a long book. But somehow within the last 100 pages, I wanted more! So a real mixed bag when it came to pacing, but as with the first book, the writing was beautiful.

I’m fully invested in the world of Deavebad, and cannot wait to read the third book of this trilogy!

THE KINGDOM OF COPPER cashes in on the tension heralded by every political machination and twisted promise in THE CITY OF BRASS. Nahri, Ali, and Dara are at cross-purposes with each other and almost everyone else as Daevabad's brutality towards the Shafit begets more violence.

THE CITY OF BRASS set up a complicated system of alliances, slights, centuries-old grievances, and current injustices. In THE KINGDOM OF COPPER, the web gets a few more strands like slave auctions and mass murder of the oppressed, then pulls the strands tight to slaughter whoever gets in the way. It’s intricate, filled with conflicting allegiances, friendships, and hidden family. There’s some political theater, but almost every gesture carries behind it the threat of real violence against a plethora of minor and secondary characters, stacking death and misery higher and higher until the main characters can take it no more and the bloody showdown commences. There’s always another way that someone was terrible a long time ago and now a new person is ready to kill in the name of the long-dead. Three protagonists, all utterly convinced that their way of doing things is the one that will work, and a bevy of secondary characters all with their own deadly plans that cross and combine in unexpected ways to drench the city in blood.

I love the world building. A lot of the backstory was set up by the first book, but they live long lives and the pace at which new revelations occur is just right. In a world where there’s someone who knows what happened and might even have been there, it’s a matter of having the right protagonist ask the right question of the right person at the proper time… usually after a different protagonist tried to learn the same thing and was rebuffed. It’s a layered style that keeps any one character from knowing everything while making sure that by the time the reader gets the answer there’s been enough of a build up that it feels like a revelation. It even works when one character keeps trying to figure out something one of the other two already knows. Ali is my favorite, but together he, Nahri, and Dara combine to cover enough of the story’s angles to leave me very happy as a detail-hungry reader.

The pacing is excellent, the conclusion is stunning. I loved every minute and I’m ready to read the final book.