The City of Brass (Daevabad Trilogy)

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I loved everything about Dara. I was intrigued by him from the moment he entered the picture and as the plot advanced and his mysterious yet tragic past slowly started to unravel, I sympathised with him, rooted for him and quite literally, he became the reason I wanted to finish the book. But the bloodletting and loss of his beloved Nahri have unleashed the worst demons of Dara’s dark past. To vanquish them, he must face some ugly truths about his history and put himself at the mercy of those he once considered enemies. Nahri, our Aladdin here, is a twenty-year-old thief and con artist, working marks in 18th Century French-occupied Cairo. She has a gift for discerning medical maladies and another for treating them. She is adept at languages and at parting the unwary from their money. When she is called in to help deal with a 12-year-old girl who is possessed, she rolls her eyes and opts to have a bit of fun trotting out an old spell that has never worked before. The difference here is that she tries it in a language she seems to have known forever, but which no one else has ever heard. Turns out the girl really was possessed, by a particularly nasty entity, and turns out that Nahri’s little experiment summoned a very scary djinn. In a flash, the evil possessor spirit and a large number of its dead minions are on her like decay on a corpse. Thankfully, the djinn is there to save the day, with extreme prejudice. Thus begins a beautiful friendship. Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling: Muntadhir, the elder brother, is a hedonistic socialite, and Ali is a devout scholar who's spent his life training to be The Good Chancellor. Subverted— Muntadhir reveals himself to be clever and canny, and knows much more about the political realities of court life than Ali.

Our Zombies Are Different: They're called ghouls here, and they're of a pre-Romero variety, primarily being dried out corpses of people who made contracts with the Ifrit in death. They can be very fast, however.Family Relationship Switcheroo: Manizheh reveals to Nahri that she's actually Rustam's daughter, making Manizheh her aunt and Jamshid her cousin. Flying carpets. Shape-shifters. Clan warfare. Personal ambitions. Power politics. Racial and religious tensions. The book begins in 18th-century Cairo and follows Nahri, a talented orphan con woman who uses palm reading and sleight of hand to swindle Ottoman nobles, and has healing powers. During an exorcism, she accidentally summons a djinn warrior named Darayavahoush e-Afshin, "Dara" for short. Recognizing her healing powers as belonging to the long-dead Nahids, a powerful magical family and ancient rulers of the djinn, he takes her on a journey to Daevabad, the city her ancestors built. Along the way they meet powerful magical creatures that are out to either help them or kill them, and their flight to Daevabad becomes one of survival. Along the way they grow close as Dara tells Nahri of the magical world she never believed in, and reveals its many prejudiced and political complications while trying to hide his own role in it. Undressing the Unconscious: Ali is mortified to realize that Nahri, with whom he has mutual Unresolved Sexual Tension, was the one to bathe and change him during his illness. She tries to brush it off because she's The Medic and he's "...well-formed", and they change the subject.

In The City of Brass, Nahiri, an orphaned hustler/healer living in the streets of Cairo, accidentally summons a handsome, brooding djinn, Dara. He tells Nahiri of her magical origins and takes her on a reluctant journey to Daevabad, the magical city the djinns call home. Tha "She learned revolution is, in fact, always unimaginable. It shatters the world you know. The future is unwritten, brimming with potential. The colonizers have no idea what's coming, and that makes them panic. It terrifies them. In the third book, Manizheh invokes this when she gives the ifrit Nahri's birth name, allowing them to bind her. It's especially strong because only Manizheh knew the name, which increases its power. While bound, Nahri considers which name is her true name and realizes that every important event and choice in her life was made as Nahri, making that her true name. And since everyone knows it, it has no power to bind her.DAEVA: The ancient term for all fire elementals before the djinn rebellion, as well as the name of the tribe residing in Daevastana, of which Dara and Nahri are both part. Once shapeshifters who lived for millennia, daevas had their magical abilities sharply curbed by the Prophet Suleiman as a punishment for harming humanity. Abandoned Hospital: Daevabad used to have a place of healing that was run by the Nahids. Nahri puts considerable time and effort into restoring it as a good faith gesture. It was also used by the Nahids as a place to conduct horrific experiments on the shafit. Parental Substitute: Yaqub, a Jewish doctor and surgeon, is the closest thing Nahri has to one in Cairo. He fusses over her, passes his knowledge to her, and even offers to let her inherit his business when she and Ali are hiding in Cairo in the third book. Monster in the Moat: Played With: the moat itself is the monster. The djinn's capital city is in the middle of a lake of Murder Water that tears apart anyone who so much as dips a toe in. They use it as a defensive feature (and for executions), but it originated in a Curse against them by the marid, from whom they stole the lake.

Among other awards and nominations which will be added here soon, the Daevabad series was nominated for a Hugo Award, a 2021 Best Series finalist. [2] Like a God to Me: The Daeva tribe holds the Nahid clan in high esteem as the descendants of revered Anahid, the woman who laid the foundations for both Daevabad and the modern magical world. The marid, by contrast, hate her guts for stealing their sacred lake. for This is for Bookworm45 for reminding me I had this idea floating around Fandoms: The Daevabad Trilogy - S. A. Chakraborty Creative Sterility: After Nahri gets him to open his mind a little, the high priest Kartir points out to Dara that—for all the supposed inferiority of humans—the daevas and djinn made human society a model for their new world after Suleiman. Their styles of architecture, art, clothing, and worship are all based on customs that were invented by humans.Deliberate Values Dissonance: Sobek , the crocodilian god of the Nile, appears in Empire of Gold and horrifies Nahri and Ali by reminiscing about how his followers used to practice Human Sacrifice for him. Ali reflects a couple of times that it's a good thing his ancestors ended that kind of worship. Ifrit are those daevas who refused to submit to Suleiman's judgment. They're all quite ancient at this point, not to mention vindictive and crafty.