The Kingdom of Copper (The Daevabad Trilogy #2)

by S. A. Chakraborty

ISBN 978-0-06-267813-3

Disclaimer: I received a free review copy of this title from the publisher.

“To be a Nahid in the throne room was to have her family’s stolen heritage thrust in her face while she was forced to bow down before the thieves”

It has been five years since Nahri and Muntadhir were forced into a marriage alliance, and Ali was exiled to Am Gezira. Ghassan’s iron-fisted rule has only tightened on the hidden djinn city of Daevabad. Nahri has spent her days in the infirmary with Nisreen, mastering the Nahid art of healing, and trying to figure out how to fix the damage that was done to Jamshid, despite the curse that seems to prevent her magic from properly acting on him. But as her powers grow, and the old Nahid palace begins to respond to her magic, Nahri worries that if Ghassan discovers what she can truly do, he will eliminate her once and for all. But she will not be content to remain under his thumb much longer.

In the second volume of S.A. Chakraborty’s Daevabad Trilogy, rival factions collide, and war is brewing. Tensions between the clans within the magical city are escalating, with the half-blood shafit always paying the largest price for the conflict between the Daevas and the Geziri. Relations with Ta Ntry have grown fraught, as Queen Hatset punishes her husband for exiling her son by cutting off the flow of necessary taxes from the wealthy land of her birth. Meanwhile, unknown forces are gathering outside the city, setting themselves against Ghassan’s rule. Chakraborty has developed a fraught dynamic by granting the reader access to multiple narrative perspectives. The warring groups are not speaking to, or sometimes even aware of, one another, but the reader can see the collision course that is being charted as the generation festival of Navasatem approaches.

Ali had been settling into a quiet life in Am Gezira, making peace with the results of his fall into Daevabad’s haunted lake, and trying to use his abilities to benefit the people who live in Am Gezira’s draught-stricken desert. But Daevabad is not done with him yet, drawing him back into its web, and the intrigues of his father’s court. Once trained to be his brother’s Qaid, the military seems to draw hope from his return, but commanding such loyalty is a dangerous thing for a younger prince. The two once-close brothers have been converted into bitter rivals, and Ghassan seems torn on the question of which one should inherit his throne, and Suleiman’s Seal with it.

Nahri is likewise trying to make peace with her choices, and the harm they have done to people she cared about. Once an outsider in Daevabad, she has stepped into the shoes of the Banu Nahida, a role that is at once powerful amongst the Daeava, and powerless thanks to Ghassan’s tight control over her life. This tension leads to her relating more and more strongly to the Daeva, at the cost of potentially playing into the deadly rivalry that has left deep wounds in the city’s psyche. Their prejudices threaten to poison everything, and Nahri is not immune to this thinking. Nor can she really understand why, when she seeks to ally herself with a shafit doctor, the woman is distrustful of her motives. The more Nahri hates Ghassan and resents Muntadhir, the more she seeks refuge in her Nahid heritage, little knowing what it truly means to be a Nahid.

Volume three seems set on a collision course with the woman who began this saga when she faked her own death, and abandoned her half-blood child in the slums of Cairo. Nahri does not know her mother, and has no reason to trust her. She knows the al Qahtani siblings, even if she has little reason to trust in them. The Kingdom of Copper is a gripping continuation of The City of Brass that will leave you eager for The Empire of Gold, due out in 2020

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You might also like The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker.