Review: The City of Brass - Shannon Chakraborty

The City of Brass is easily one the best books I've ever read.
This book is so well constructed, so well paced, so beautifully established, and so achingly relevant.

To start, the book refuses to dumb itself down for the YA audience it seems to be written for. Court drama is dense and complicated, worldbuilding is extensive and wonderfully effective at both supporting the narrative and physically setting scenes, non-English words are brought into every other sentence, and every villain is disquietingly relatable.
There's a lot of YA fantasy out there, high fantasy even more so, and non-European high fantasy yet more so, that seems to require a simplification process in it's lore and narrative structure. To have it's supposedly unmarketable wrinkles ironed out. City of Brass resists that trend beautifully. Characters are intelligent and cunning because they prove themselves to be, not because the reader is told they are, and mental challenges aren't glossed over, but are elaborated on to better explain how they confound the protagonists.
Through it all, the book manages to have its cake and eat it, managing to be streamlined and wonderfully paced while being deeply engaging.

The romantic subplots are healthy like regrettably few examples. Dara is a toxic character that realistically endears himself to Nahri, while consistently infuriating her. She isn't caught in his trap, she's questioning him at every turn, which gives her such agency without dis-empowering Dara. Alizayd is a saccharine sweet friend, whose flaw is his naivete and traditionalism, but again, these things rob him of power and agency.
This love triangle ends up looking like both a desperate love letter to, and vicious critisism of the masculine norms of Nahri's love interests. Alizayd's innocence doesn't excuse his dogmatism, and Dara's swagger doesn't excuse his manipulation. Both men are fiercely loyal, incredibly lovable characters with deep rooted immature flaws that Nahri exposes and savagely challenges more than once.
This is how teen romance should be written.

I am no expert on Zoroastrianism or Middle Eastern folklore, but I felt this book did a fantastic job of constructing an Arabian fantasy world, creating something immediately accessible and fascinatingly immersive. It's one of those fantasy books where the creatures created bespoke for its own world, such as Shafit, aren't distinguishable from the genuine legends of folklore.
It's also really cool to see ghouls represented with a degree of authenticity, as this fantasy creature in particular has been largely separated from it's Arabian roots by the appropriative march of conventional European fantasy. I can't wait to see this world grow, and open up corner by corner.

To pick holes: while Nahri is incredibly capable across a spectrum of skills, and deeply likeable, she is the only female character with a keen degree of agency. While the book's cast is large, and few characters feel especially unnecessary, unfortunately Zainab is one of them. Zainab is cunning like Nahri, but doesn't have much to do on the page, and with all other female characters being maternal, prostitutes, or barely present, female representation was left lacking for me besides the fantastic protagonist.
I won't lower my rating for this however, as I believe its unhealthy to expect books to be built to represent absolutely everyone, and often a single book can only effectively represent so many things, and City of Brass does far, far more than most.
That being said, I hope to see more women in the rest of the trilogy with agency that isn't solely born from their charisma.

The City of Brass is a rare treasure and deserves all the praise it has received and more. S.A. Chakraborty has written her way into my heart, and I will read whatever she writes from this day forward religiously.