Reviews with content warning for Child death - The Kingdom of Copper

A fascinating sequel to The City of Brass, this book quickly moves forward five years from the events of the previous book. Characters have matured, relationships are more complex, and the city of Daevabad is not always a balanced, safe place to be.
The plot builds to a tense climax, and sets up new problems to be dealt with (hopefully!) in the next book. Which I look forward to reading!

Content Warnings

madison_mls's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous dark emotional tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

Really strong sequel to the first book! The last 40% had me GAGGED!! The world and character building is developed further in this book in a way that is done really well without any heavy info dumping. Plus it’s all paced so incredibly well. Can’t wait to read the third and final installment!!

Content Warnings

mariazen's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Content Warnings

meg_leigh's review against another edition

Go to review page

2.0

I so enjoyed this author's Adventures book, and The City of Bronze. But this one was just disappointing.

Every. Single. Character. Is so deeply selfish and unlikeable. And the level of violence against children, the sheer number of children dying, borders on trauma porn.

Half the characters' choices make no sense or have any consistency from page to page.

I already bought the third book, such was my excitement, so I'll read it and hope this installment was just an unfortunate misstep.

Content Warnings

boba_nbooks's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

This was a wonderfully magical continuation of the Daevebad Trilogy.

My one criticism was the pacing seemed to be quite slow in the beginning and quite fast-paced at the end. But though it started out a little slow, I understand where Chakraborty was going with the placement of each character and where they ended up when the book was over. The last 100 pages takes the reader on a journey at break-neck speed! It drew me in so fully that I couldn't stop reading.

I absolutely loved the second installment in this trilogy. It was a delight to learn more about the different tribes, the history of Daevebad, the true story of the marid, and the ifrit. I can't wait to see how it all plays out in the final book, but I'm also going to be quite sad to leave this world as it has me enraptured.

Content Warnings

viireads's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous mysterious fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.25

Content Warnings

rinku's review against another edition

Go to review page

dark tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.0

I’m gonna be honest: If I didn’t spend 15 € on The Kingdom of Copper, I wouldn’t have finished it. I just didn’t care about anything happening or any of the characters because many of their motivations were so unclear, and the main plot progressed just too slow for my taste.

One big problem I had with the novel is that it was too long, it could’ve been easily 100 or even 200 pages shorter. One of the reasons the book dragged a lot was the five-year time skip. After the disappointment that Locklands was, I’m really sceptical when it comes to long time-skips, and here, it wasn’t well executed. We spend the first hundred pages only with explaining what has happened in this time and how certain relationships have developed which was so boring. Nahri had to marry Muntadhir, the other prince of king Ghassan, and lives now at the court of Daevabad. Ali lives in a random village and now can control some kind of water magic, and Dara is just there and planning something. Even though there’s so much time spent with explaining and characters talking to each other and nothing more, I still didn’t get all the alliances, the different cultures and the reasons for their grievances.

Most of the time, I was just waiting for anything to happen because for at least half of the book, nothing that is happening has any relevance for the overarching plot, and I’m still not sure what this overarching plot is. The focus is on some hospital that should be rebuilt but I don’t know why I should care about this at all, it was just boring. Besides this, there’s barely any action and even less magic which was unfortunate as well. But we know something will happen at one point because in Dara’s POV, he’s planning a war with some people. It took me again such a long time to understand who’s he in an alliance with and what they have against their enemy. The problem I see with his POV is that it takes some of the tension away since we already know what will happen and what the plans of the bad guys(?) are. If we didn’t, the things happening would’ve been way more shocking.

Only like the last hundred pages were quite good and dramatic and the reason that I didn’t give this The Kingdom of Copper only one star. Even though there were some moments I still didn’t understand, like

where the random rebellion against the king came from or why Nahri was arrested, even though she obviously hadn’t to do with it

, or some that were predictable, like

Nahri’s mentor dying

, it was still interesting. The

was so creepy and a true threat and I loved to see how Muntadhir, Zaynab and Nahri worked together towards the end; it would’ve been so great if they did so earlier

Like I’ve said above, the biggest problem I had with the characters were that many of their motivations were not clear which led to me just being irritated because of their behaviour. For example, I thought that Ghassan would hate Ali and wanted him to die when he exiled him, but he’s so worried about him here which confused me so much. This should probably show that he’s a grey character, but this didn’t convince me. Another character I couldn’t understand at all was Nahri herself. Her extreme stubbornness annoyed me so much, just like her resentfulness towards Ali which I couldn’t understand at all – she seemingly forgot that Dara killed him as well. Talking about Dara, I don’t like him at all, and he annoyed me with his self-pitying since I just don’t care for him. I even had problems understanding the motivations of some side characters, like Jamshid. The only characters I kinda liked were Muntadhir and Zaynab, but that’s it.

The Kingdom of Copper wasn’t even a disappointing read for me since I had no expectations for it, it was just boring and confusing. This is so sad, considering that Chakraborty has such a detailed world and obviously cares quite a lot for it. I already bought the third book – I probably didn’t if I’ve read The Kingdom of Copper before – and I’ll find out how the series will end, I suppose.

Content Warnings

More...