The Empire of Gold

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Everything that was built up in the first two novels all comes to a boiling point in The Empire of Gold. It is a wild ride from start to finish, with a handful of new characters, and many terrifying older ones. Overall, I enjoyed this series, but it isn't a new favorite or anything. Unfortunately, the ending of all the fighting and violence was at about 80% of the way through the book, and the last 20% was just...almost epilogue-y things. It made the ending of the book feel rather unnecessarily drawn out, and that's coming from someone who really likes epilogues. Throughout the book things would ramp up, and then plateau, over and over. I kept waiting for things to finally get to that tipping point, and when they did, it was almost disappointing how smoothly things went.

Nahri learns more about her past, and that was fascinating. I loved learning more about who she really was, and why everything about her life went the way that it did. She makes some decisions throughout this book, and I mostly agreed with them. There were a few I questioned, but ultimately she made the right choices, I think. Ali learns more about himself, too, and becomes even less irritating. Things like mortal peril and your friends dying will do that to you, I think. Dara finally grows a backbone, and while I loved how that played out, there was so much death and violence by his hand that it was hard to continue liking his character. (I did like how Chakraborty chose to end his storyline, though. Very fitting.) Manizheh was flat out terrifying, a picture of insanity brought on by decades (and generations) of abuse and enslavement. I understand why she did the things that she did, but holy cow does that not excuse any of it. Wow. Way to make everything worse.

I do wish we could have seen how things played out far into the future for Daevabad. The ending of the book was already looooong enough, but I do want to know what happened to the great city. Do they work it out? Does it fall again? But alas, it was not to be since we don't learn anything about the future. Oh well. Final rating for this one sits at four stars. I enjoyed it. Overall for the whole series, I think I'd rate it at barely 4 stars. I loved the first book, the second was mediocre, and the third book I just liked. But despite saying that, I would definitely recommend it, especially if you're looking for something Non-Western culture inspired!