Reviews and Comments

Somehow I ended up doing a bunch of pre-20th century group reads lately. Out of all of them, this is by far the book I like the best. Dracula is wonderfully atmospheric but also painfully racist; Moby Dick's best parts are absolutely gorgeous but it could have done with a massive edit, also racism; I got bored of Don Quixote after a while. But this one is wonderfully and tightly written, and I'm reasonably confident that everything obnoxious in it is intentionally so (in short: oh, Victor is so perfectly hateable).

Historical note: Jardine & Matheson were real people and played very much the same role in real history that they are playing when they show up in this book. Their company, now just "Jardine Matheson", still exists, still has a large footprint in Hong Kong, and did very well out of Britain's abuse of China. If you don't know the history and don't want spoilers then I'd wait until a couple of chapters after they're introduced to look them up. Though I'm also assuming that somewhere after where I've reached, the book must diverge from the real history.

Karl Gützlaff was also a real person whose attitudes seem to be faithfully represented in the book, though I don't know enough about him to know how historically accurate his actions in the book are. #SFFBookClub

Book 2 in a series, and a wonderful fleshing out of things that were introduced in City of Brass. The politics get more complicated and feel more real as a result, the focus characters get more developed, and the city feels more alive. It feels like such a sharp analysis of the ways resentments and conflicts get stuck and self-feeding that I kept seeing real-world stories reflected in it. But it's never as narrow as an allegory for any one thing in the real world, it's much more an exploration of the whole type of thing.

It does have weaknesses: never getting Ghassan's perspective lets him feel like a cartoon villain, and never getting Muntadhir's makes his growth feel lurching and unpredictable... which in fairness it probably would have done to people around him too. And where the ending of City of Brass deftly managed to stand on its own at the same time as leaving a clear opening for a sequel, the end of this one doesn't stand on its own at all.

I'm very glad that the teaser for Empire of Gold makes clear that we'll get some chapters from Manizheh's perspective, and I hope it also gives Zaynab a bit more space, since she feels a bit like a plot mechanism so far. But I couldn't put this volume down and it took some self control to not launch directly into the next.

A very emotional and structurally interesting book - somewhere between a set of short stories and a set of chapters with very varied styles and points of view.

I loved the ways the stories were connected to each other, and the best of them were absolutely heartrending pictures of grief, fear, and mourning. Many of them did live on in my mind for some time afterwards. But towards the end I felt like some of the broader attempts to pull it all together in one arc didn't quite land for me.

#SFFBookClub

CW for this book: a big piece of what it's about is stuck conflicts and deeply ingrained oppression, and the ways in which mutual fear / the fears of the people currently on top keep them stuck with horrifying consequences. Reading it right now I keep thinking about Palestine, which I think is partly intentional but there are also strong echoes of many other things. I'm about 2/3 of the way through and I think it's excellent, just also a very grim read.

To some extent this applies to City Of Brass too, but this volume paints a lot more of the history of the trilogy's world and goes a lot harder on the political themes.

Chapter 3: I see now that characters from one story do show up in others, so the book overall will get to have character arcs not just a zoomed-out plot one. Makes me even more curious how much the stories have been reworked between individual publication and collecting into book form.

#SFFBookClub