First impressions review: The Daevabad Trilogy, by S.A. Chakraborty
The City of Brass
This book hooked me so fast! At forty page, I was already thinking: “Yes. Love it. This is what ‘Alif the Unseen’ wishes it was!” We follow Nahri, a young woman - can you still be a street urchin if you’re 20? - living by her wits in Napoleonic-era Cairo. In Nahri’s case, that means blending her natural ability to sense and heal diseases and injuries with a big dose of snake oil saleswomanship and a little light thievery:
Nahri glanced up at the man…He’d gone pale, and she paused to listen for the pulse of his heart. It was fast and uneven due to fright, but she could sense it pumping healthy blood throughout his body…he suffered from nothing other than an excess of wealth. She’d be glad to help him with that.
While carrying out a faith-healing ceremony, she inadvertently summons a centuries-old djinn warrior named Darayavahoush1:
She heard the voice, clear as a bell and angry as a tiger, in the language she’d been listening for all her life. ‘Suleiman’s eye!’ it roared. ‘I will kill whoever called me here!’…He stepped forward…and immediately lost his balance, grabbing for a dessicated tree trunk…the bark burst into flames beneath his hand…he leaned against the tree with a sigh, the flames licking harmlessly at his robe.
An ifrit immediately shows up and tries to kill them, forcing the two to flee. Dara tells Nahri that her healing abilities and instinctive ability to speak Divasti means she must be the half-blood descendant of an important Daeva family he used to serve, one that is supposed to be extinct, and that the only place she’ll be safe is the city of Daevabad (located roughly between real-world Pakistan and Afghanistan).
1. Daeva warrior, technically – it is an important distinction to him.
While happy to escape the ifrit and the ghouls they can conjure, Nahri is not down with this plan to leave the human world forever. For his part, Dara is not particularly happy to be traveling with a shafit (half-djinn) – especially one who would expose his Nahid patrons as hypocrites: they were meant to enforce Suleiman’s ban2 on djinn breeding with humans. At one point, Nahri plans to run, tries to pocket Dara’s emerald ring, and is plunged into traumatic memories of the violent things he’d had to do for humans as a wish-granting slave djinn. The two grow closer as they bicker across hundreds of miles of desert and save each other from various dangers.
2. Yes, this is King Solomon, who according to Middle Eastern folklore used djinn to build his temple.
Meanwhile, the story shifts back and forth between the travelers and Prince Alizayd in Daevabad. This is a brilliant choice, as it allows Chakraborty to expand the world-building through the eyes of a character who is familiar with Daevabad and magic but who is naïve in terms of the nitty-gritty of city life and politics. Ali, the 18-year-old second son of king Ghassan, has spent most of his life in the Citadel training with the royal guards, but he is also quite bookish, being particularly interested in human science and artifacts, and a religiously-devout idealist. As such, he has gotten entangled with some shafit agitating against their third-class-citizen status within the city. Ali is mixed-blood in a different sense, bearing the dark skin and affinity for water of his African djinn mother; we learn through his reaction to the term that “crocodile” is a slur toward the Ayaanle3. However, Ali himself is prejudiced toward the “fire-worshippers” – the Daeva tribe who used to rule, and who in turn are particularly hostile to the shafit on whose behalf the Geziri conquered the city. This gives us a good sense of the situation Nahri will be walking into: As a shafit she would rank low, but as the last survivor of a ruling Daeva family with long-missed healing powers she would be welcomed by many and might even be considered a legitimate heir to the throne!
3. Something that will prove very relevant in later books!
Once Dara and Nahri arrive in the city we get what seems to be the setup for a love triangle. Normally I’m not a huge fan of this trope, but it works for me here for several reasons. First, while Nahri is very smart, she’s never had a chance to study, and it is fun to watch her learn to read and geek out over a telescope with the initially prickly Ali…who, at this point, is just a friend. Second, the conflict between Dara and Ali isn’t about Nahri at all – the history of violence between their tribes feels very fresh for the 1400-year-old Dara4 while, to Ali, Dara is a monster out of legend. Third, there are a lot of interesting complications. While Nahri would like to be with Dara, he’s trying to get her to marry some other Daeva because he’s technically not alive; Ali, as the second son, isn’t supposed to marry anyone; and the king wants a political match between Nahri and his heir, Ali’s playboy brother Muntadhir.
4. Since Dara can’t remember most of his history as a slave, Ali’s grandfather sacking Daevabad and murdering his family literally feels like it happened yesterday!
~~If you don’t want any potential *spoilers* as to what happens after the midpoint of book 1, skip to “Overall Recommendation” – which is just “go read the books!” ~~
These tensions come to a messy, violent, emotionally dramatic dénouement in the last few chapters, leaving Nahri separated from both Ali and Dara, and stuck with a fiancée and a king who do not like or trust her.
The Kingdom of Copper
This middle book is a painful one that explores how political events can spiral way out of control, and how war and trauma can lead seemingly well-intentioned people to do monstrous things. Can a war criminal change his ways? Will some of the more self-righteous characters be led down the same path? Are there some acts that are never justifiable, even if you think they will save your family or bring safety to your people? The religious/ethnic conflict that is depicted doesn’t seem to be directly based on any specific human example but feels very resonant given the history of the regions of the world where the story is set. In fact, the very first scene echoes the escape of the last heir of the Umayyad caliphate (from the Abbasids who overthrew his family) across the Euphrates river.
While reading the first book, I kept thinking that Nahri, Ali, and Dara needed to frickin’ talk to each other, because they collectively had the skills, experience, and ethnic backgrounds/social roles that might actually defuse the three-way civil war that was clearly brewing. Unfortunately, they didn’t, and in this book the tensions between the Gezhiri (Ali’s tribe), the Daevas, and the shafit boil over, with some outside intervention. Nahri, it turns out, is not the last Nahid! However, that surprise relative should have realized that a healer raised in the human world who didn’t know or care about ancient djinn blood-feuds until a few years ago would not take kindly to them slaughtering shafit and other non-Daevas on her behalf! By the end, Nahri is free, but Daevabad is in ruins and without magic. All the main characters are a psychological mess at this point as well – so can they break their destructive patterns and move forward?
An Empire of Gold
This book might be the best of the series. We meet up with Nahri and Ali in Egypt, and discover it isn’t just Daevabad’s magic that is on the fritz, it is all djinn magic! Both of them are pretty traumatized, but the change in setting provides many funny moments. Nahri gets to reunite with her elderly Jewish apothecary friend Yaqub, who, like most humans, has trouble remembering Ali if he’s quiet for too long. Ali gets to learn about the human world, getting enthralled by mechanical toy chickens and experiencing bartering for the first time:
“I just don’t understand why you had to be so mean,”Ali complained… Nahri handed him a tin of dates. “I didn’t say anything untrue.” “You said his mother must have dropped him on his head as an infant!” “Did you hear his asking price?”
They set off on journey to meet up with Ali’s mother in her East-African homeland, and in the process meet some terrific new characters including Sobek (a crocodilian marid once worshipped as a god in Egypt), Tiamat (a giant Lovecraftian horror who was a Babylonian goddess of primordial chaos), and the shafit pirate girl Fiza. We also get some great development for existing characters. The new Nahid queen of Daevabad does not handle disappointment well, going increasingly dark and violent. Another major character regrets the methods by which they took the city and tries to get her to change her path, and what she does to him is truly a fate worse than death! I loved Jamshid, Prince Muntadhir’s favorite guard, since book 1 – he is just such a genuinely nice guy who’s had terrible luck - and I was delighted to really see him come into his own here. I didn’t like Muntadhir, initially, but this book gave me a new appreciation for the Emir and I was rooting for him to reunite with Jamshid and reconcile with Ali, who both think he’s dead! As with the other books, the ending is intense and bonkers in the best way possible, but this time leading to a positive conclusion.
Things I loved:
- Nahri. I loved this scrappy, not-always-honest, but ultimately good-hearted heroine. There were some ups and downs, but her character development ultimately came together very nicely. Nahri is, understandably, in fish-out-of-water mode for much of book 1, just trying to figure out magic and palace politics and not kill any of the patients brought to her with magical ailments she’s never seen before. We see the savvy con-artist side of her when it’s reported how tough she was in negotiating her own dowry, and then we’re left on this note:
Ghassan sat upon a Nahid throne. And he didn’t look pleased…It was frustrating when someone upended your well-laid plans. It’s why one never stopped plotting alternatives… Nahri smiled…It was the smile she’d given the basha, the smile she’d given to hundreds of arrogant men throughout the years just before she swindled them for all they were worth. Nahri always smiled at her marks.
Unfortunately, in book 2 Nahri spends much of her time as a virtual prisoner in her infirmary, rather than running mental rings around the king as I’d hoped. It’s realistic that she didn’t win most of her contests against the king, but it would have been nice to see her early efforts directly, rather than catching up with her when she’s largely given up. But her magic, healing, and political negotiation abilities develop over the course of the book, and her thief skills come into play at the end, when she gets to make use of a new sleight of hand. By the third book she is able to bring all those skills together in a truly badass fashion!
- All the other characters. Pretty much every character we spend more than a few paragraphs with is distinctive and compelling, with their own clear goals, values, and beliefs, which evolve over the course of the story as they interact with one another. Even the ones who do truly horrible things do them for reasons we can understand; you can see how they have convinced themselves that they are in the right.
- The non-standard but perfect endings. Not only does Nahri get to fulfill her own lifelong dream, becoming a doctor instead of a queen, all the surviving characters get an ending that feels appropriate for them rather than necessarily what one would expect from the fantasy-epic format. I didn’t even know I cared what the princess was going to do with her life post-war, but I loved the answer! I teared up multiple times during the wrap-up, including over a character who I thought I’d lost sympathy for. But this book believes in restorative justice, and his fate is far more appropriate than either being killed or having the “dying-nobly” redemption one might expect to see.
- Wonderful descriptive writing. It is very easy to picture the fantastical settings Chakraborty conjures up. The character designs are also really neat, especially the marids! For instance, Tiamat looks like this:
A spiked tail like a massive club and horselike forelegs that ended in talons. What might have been an udder, weeping waterfalls, and armored plates jutting from her back like hazy mountains, obscured by rainy gloom…Her face was almost too terrible to behold, a leering skull that mixed the worst features of a lion and a dragon. Bull ears jutted over eyes like swirling typhoons, and jagged teeth…filled a muzzle framed with more tentacles.
- Casual representation. There is variation in skin tone and culture among the Djinn, just as you’d find among humans in the region. Most of the djinn are Muslim, but the Daevas follow a religion that is probably inspired by Zoroastrianism. Ali and his sister are black, while his half-brother is light-skinned. There are also two same-gender couples who, while having to be discreet in public, are accepted by their friends and relatives. And none of the black or queer characters die! Also, while djinn women do veil like their human counterparts, there is a pretty high level of acceptance of women as fighters, scholars, healers, and leaders in the djinn world. That is nice because it not only gives us a range of female characters who are active in the story but reflects how there isn’t always a 1:1 correlation between wearing a hijab and having a super-conservative lifestyle or viewpoints. Only the religious differences have direct relevance to the main plot but including all of this makes the world of the book feel more real and inclusive.
A few minor quibbles:
- Occasional anachronisms. Characters will sometimes use language that sounds too modern or express ideas that seem a bit odd for someone living in an early-19th-century monarchy. It was easy to suspend disbelief for the former, as they aren’t speaking English anyway – we can treat this as a translation! Most of the latter weren’t too significant, except…
- Can ending a monarchy really be that easy? The transition from monarchy to some form of democracy/republic has historically been pretty rocky in the real world. Of course, in this situation all the remaining “legitimate” heirs to the throne have agreed that the transition needs to happen and Daevabad has been through two genocidally violent monarchs in the past decade. I could see a good chunk of the population being willing to try something new, with the hard-line monarchists being in the awkward position of going against both former ruling families if they wanted to find another royal candidate. That could buy a few years of peace, at least. But it is hard to believe that part of the happy ending won’t hit some snags in the near future!
One could also argue that there are too few major character deaths given the general carnage. However, this wasn’t really bothersome to me, because A) all the characters are magical and the reasons they survive potentially lethal situations always make sense within the world of the story and B) more than once the choice to not kill off a character actually subverts modern genre expectations. Also, consider ‘Lord of the Rings’: Despite all the battles and dangers, only one member of the Fellowship of the Ring “dies”, and since wizards in Middle Earth are immortal spirits it isn’t a break in reality for him to come back. But almost no one complains that more main characters should have died! The situation in this book is similar, except that no one gets conveniently airlifted by eagles!
Overall recommendation: If you are a fantasy fan, go read these books right now! Don’t let the length (each >600 pages) intimidate you. I got completely sucked in and finished each volume in 2-4 days – they are that entertaining and suspenseful!
Note: This isn't tagged as Asian or Middle Eastern author because, like "Alif Unseen", this book was written by a white American woman who is a convert to Islam; Chakraborty is her married name. However, as I've now reviewed multiple books by Muslim authors, I may add a tag for that.
