A review by paragraphsandpages
The City of Dusk by Tara Sim
3.0
This book should've been absolutely everything I loved combined in one book, and in some ways it definitely was, but it just didn't hit for me. For a 500-page book, there honestly just wasn't enough time to fit in everything.
This book's greatest strength, it's intense world-building that goes so deep you can sink into it, is also its greatest weakness, purely because it comes at the cost of everything else. You can have the most intriguing world, but if there are no characters to meet it on that same level, your whole story just loses its purpose. You can have the tastiest cake base, but if your frosting is bland, you still won't want to eat the cake. And that's not to say the characters were bland or cookie cutter necessarily, maybe it would've been better if they had been! Instead, these interesting, flawed characters were just not given the space they needed for me to care about them. There is always so much going on that we never get the calm moments where we bond with our characters, where we begin to feel for their relationships and care about them meeting their goals. Instead, we are just constantly given either action or world building, but no character development. Add to that the extensive side character catalog that gets very difficult to keep track (because again, none of them are given enough time to become memorable), and you have a massive pool of characters but not a single connection to any of them. And this only is worsened when all the romances start building up, because you barely feel invested in any of them (except for the straight relationship, because that actually occurs between two main character, so you have a bit more build up there at least). Really, this book could have just been so good if the priorities were balanced a little better.
But even with all this, I still saw so much potential in this book, and this series, and it does make me excited about the future of this series. I love the twists that were revealed as the story progressed, even if some were a smidge predictable, and I honestly always love when gods play a role in stories like this. There's just so much going on here, in a good way this time, and I can't wait to see where all these threads go next. Hopefully the characters get a bit more room to breath in the next book, as most of the set-up is done now, and we can start to form actual connections with them.
Overall, there were a lot of good pieces here, but the combination of them all just didn't make a perfect piece for me, unfortunately. Despite it all, I do have plans to finish this series, and I am tentatively excited to see where it all goes next!
This book's greatest strength, it's intense world-building that goes so deep you can sink into it, is also its greatest weakness, purely because it comes at the cost of everything else. You can have the most intriguing world, but if there are no characters to meet it on that same level, your whole story just loses its purpose. You can have the tastiest cake base, but if your frosting is bland, you still won't want to eat the cake. And that's not to say the characters were bland or cookie cutter necessarily, maybe it would've been better if they had been! Instead, these interesting, flawed characters were just not given the space they needed for me to care about them. There is always so much going on that we never get the calm moments where we bond with our characters, where we begin to feel for their relationships and care about them meeting their goals. Instead, we are just constantly given either action or world building, but no character development. Add to that the extensive side character catalog that gets very difficult to keep track (because again, none of them are given enough time to become memorable), and you have a massive pool of characters but not a single connection to any of them. And this only is worsened when all the romances start building up, because you barely feel invested in any of them (except for the straight relationship, because that actually occurs between two main character, so you have a bit more build up there at least). Really, this book could have just been so good if the priorities were balanced a little better.
But even with all this, I still saw so much potential in this book, and this series, and it does make me excited about the future of this series. I love the twists that were revealed as the story progressed, even if some were a smidge predictable, and I honestly always love when gods play a role in stories like this. There's just so much going on here, in a good way this time, and I can't wait to see where all these threads go next. Hopefully the characters get a bit more room to breath in the next book, as most of the set-up is done now, and we can start to form actual connections with them.
Overall, there were a lot of good pieces here, but the combination of them all just didn't make a perfect piece for me, unfortunately. Despite it all, I do have plans to finish this series, and I am tentatively excited to see where it all goes next!