The City of Brass (Part 1)
Welcome back, everyone. As promised, we have another multipart review before us.
The City of Brass was a curious read. It is flawed, to be sure. We are going to delve into those flaws in great detail. However, as was mentioned in the review for Blood Heir, many of the problems can be explained, if not rationalized, by the fact that S. A. Chakraborty wrote this book for a very different audience than that to which it was marketed. Also, despite the objective flaws with this book (ones that even the marketing choices cannot explain away), there are objective strengths. Thus, we must delve deep once more to really wring out all the potential lessons of this text.
This review will be split into 5 parts.
Part 1: Premise, Rating, Target Audience, and Virtue Signaling
Part 2: Worldbuilding
Part 3: Content Warning
Part 4: Characters
Part 5: Plot and Final Thoughts
Strap yourselves in, people. This could get messy.
STATS
Title: The City of Brass
Series: The Daevabad Trilogy (Book 1)
Author(s): S. A. Chakraborty
Genre: Fantasy (Epic)
First Printing: 2017
Publisher: Harper Voyager
SPOILER WARNING
Mild spoilers will be necessary to properly break down this story. I will include “Heavy Spoilers” in the heading for any section where further detail is required. I will keep the first paragraph of these sections as spoiler-free as possible in case you want to read the book for yourself before coming back for the full analysis.
PREMISE
Here’s what the back cover of the novel has to say for itself:
On the streets of eighteenth-century Cairo, Nahri is a con woman of unsurpassed skill. She makes her living swindling Ottoman nobles, hoping to one day earn enough to change her fortunes. But when Nahri accidentally summons Dara, an equally sly, darkly mysterious djinn warrior, during one of her cons, she learns that even the cleverest of schemes can have deadly consequences.
Forced to flee Cairo, Dara and Nahri journey together across hot, windswept sands teeming with creatures of fire and rivers where the mythical marid sleep, past ruins of once-magnificent human metropolises and mountains where the circling birds of prey are more than what they seem, to Daevabad, the legendary city of brass.
It’s a city steeped in magic and fire, where blood can be as dangerous as any spell; a city where old resentments run deep and the royal court rules with a tenuous grip; a city to which Nahri is irrevocably bound—and where her very presence threatens to ignite a war that has been simmering for centuries.
The Barnes & Noble website also have this to say (not counting fluff about the awards it won and extra content included in the back of the book):
Step into The City of Brass, the spellbinding debut from S. A. Chakraborty, perfect for fans of The Golem and the Jinni, The Grace of Kings, and Uprooted, in which the future of a magical Middle Eastern kingdom rests in the hands of a clever and defiant young con artist with miraculous healing gifts.
I can’t comment on the comparable titles, having not read them myself. Otherwise, there are only two points within this premise that I would dispute. The first is that the second paragraph of the back cover description is treating roughly 16% of the book (and the most forgettable 16% of the book, at that) as if it were the main offering. This is simply not what the book is about. The second is the assertion that Nahri is an intelligent con woman. That may have been Chakraborty’s intent, and that is certainly how Nahri is introduced, but it isn’t a defining trait for her throughout the book. If either of these two things would be the deciding factor that convinces you to read this book, I must warn you up front that you will be disappointed.
The political intrigue that this premise sets up is a very different beast. As we’ll get into when we discuss the worldbuilding, Chakraborty did an excellent job in setting up an ideological powder keg where both sides have claims to victimhood and are guilty of extremism. There are things she could have done to enhance this conflict, but it is still potent as it is.
RATING: 5/10 (Fantasy audiences), 7/10 (target audience)
Much like Notorious Sorcerer, I think that the issues with this book can be summed up into a single idea (albeit not a single word this time): cut corners.
There’s no denying that Chakraborty put in effort here. The pieces of the puzzle were prepared; she started to assemble them. It’s just that there are too many holes and places where the pieces aren’t properly fitted together. The final result is that we have a mostly assembled edge of the puzzle and a few clumps of the final image, but the remaining pieces are just haphazardly rammed into place and glued down.
After reading through Chakraborty’s website and an interview she did with Kirkus Reviews, I don’t think that this is because she lacks discipline or had shallow motivations for this book. Instead, I think that most of the cut corners (not all, but most) can be explained by her target audience. Chakraborty wrote this book specifically to appeal to a Young Adult Muslim audience based in New Jersey and Brooklyn. Her mistake was to then market this book to a general Fantasy audience across the United States, which is of both a different religious makeup and a different age range.
I cannot recommend this book for the wider Fantasy audience. There are enjoyable and well-done elements, but the overall negative qualities of the book are too pervasive for me to honestly say that it’s worth your time. If, however, you are a Muslim living in the US, a member of the Young Adult demographic, or both, I am tentatively willing to bump it up to 7/10 for you specifically. I suspect that the flaws won’t be a heavy for readers within the target demographic. The book’s strengths should therefore have enough weight to produce a positive reading experience for those individuals.
TARGET AUDIENCE
The fact that Chakraborty is specifically writing for a Young Adult Muslim audience is based upon implicit and explicit statements she has made in the Kirkus interview as well as clues within the text. Let’s go over both the Muslim demographic and the Young Adult demographic separately. We’ll touch on how we know that these were the people whom Chakraborty was (exclusively) writing for and how this led to objective flaws when she then tried to market to a wider audience.
The Muslim Demographic: Hello, Brooklyn
The Audience
Chakraborty describes herself as follows on her author website:
“Please note, while Chakraborty is my last name, I'm a white convert to Islam; a faith and community that I've found great solace in and one that has significantly influenced my work.”
She then linked two interviews, one that was posted by James McDonald at Kirkus Reviews on November 14th, 2017 and one that was done through SyFy. The link to the latter interview no longer works, but the Kirkus link is still functional. I won’t quote the entire interview, as you can read it in full for yourself on the Kirkus reviews website, but I would like to call attention to the following section:
After converting to Islam in her teens, the New Jersey native spent time studying abroad in Cairo, where she heard stories of ceremonies used to expel djinn from human hosts. Her interest piqued, she began to explore that new side of Islam more deeply, not knowing at the time that all she learned would one day make its way into a novel. “I had decided when writing this,” she says, “that those were my rules: if I couldn't find a reference to something in a text or in a story from the region, then I wasn't using it.
By the time she began seriously working on the book, about three or four years ago, however, her life had changed. “I was older, I was in a different place in my life, and I was a parent. I was living in Brooklyn and working with a youth organization through my mosque—and it became very disturbing to see, especially, how our young men are viewed in Western media. They're kids, they want to change the world, and they're burning with this desire to do good, and that's such a wonderful quality. But I’ve seen how that can be misconstrued while it's not misconstrued for teenagers of other communities. Our young people, our girls and our boys, should have representation, people that they can look up to as heroes.”
While Chakraborty’s novel, the first in a trilogy, will have broad appeal, she had a very specific audience in mind. “I really wrote it for my community,” she says. “I did not expect to ever sell this book. I wrote it more for myself and my friends and people who loved reading science fiction and fantasy but—and I've confronted this, and again I'm a privileged member of my community, a white convert—you open this book and it's cool and you're enjoying the story and then bam! There's a cliche. There’s something offensive. As a Muslim, it’s very frustrating to love this genre. There's only so long you can grin and bear it. I wanted people in my community to be able to read this and enjoy it.”
The intent here was noble. Chakraborty wanted to satisfy what she perceived as a genuine demand for stories that her community could relate to. She was motivated by specific personal experiences rather than vague talking points. This appears to be an act of genuine virtue, not a virtue signal (though we will get into that topic more down the line).
The problems started when Chakraborty decided to publish it for the broader Fantasy market of the United States without any edits.
The Cut Corner
Because Chakraborty assumed that her audience would be Muslim, she did not explain critical aspects of Islam that are needed to lend context to this story. This results in a gaping hole in the worldbuilding. There are ways to write a story that ignore this hole, with Islam merely serving as background for the culture, but Chakraborty didn’t do that. The characterization of one of the POVs is reliant upon an understanding of Islam. What’s more, every conflict in this book is rooted upon an ideological conflict between Islam and a pre-Islamic faith.
When Chakraborty was writing this book solely for her community, this was not necessarily a problem. She could reasonably assume that her audience would understand Islam well enough to not need the missing background. Given her objectives, it could even be reasonably argued that pausing to explain Islam would shatter reader immersion, as her target audience would not need these details reintroduced to them.
The problem is that, as Chakraborty herself acknowledges with her comment about Western media, the United States is overwhelmingly not Muslim. According to Pew Research, Muslims comprised only 1.1% of the US population in the year that The City of Brass was released. I have no figures on the popularity of literary genres across different religious groups, but I do not think it is unreasonable to assume that the percentage of general Fantasy readers in the United States who are Muslim will be close to that same percentage. Chakraborty’s decision to write only for her community and not make changes for the wider market therefore shot roughly 98.9% of her American audience in the foot. She should have edited the book prior to publication to incorporate the necessary exposition about her faith.
(And, no, the fact that this book is accessible to the rest of the world via e-books and foreign imprints does not justify this. Pew Research estimated that roughly 24% of the global population was Muslim in 2017. Even if we assumed that this percentage did not go down when only considering English speakers, Chakraborty still shot 76% of her audience in the foot.)
What’s particularly baffling about this is that Chakraborty is, by her own admission, a convert. She was not born into this culture. As a Catholic convert who had play catch-up to cradle Catholics, I know that she should know how little outsiders truly understand about the intricacies of a religion. I therefore do not believe that Chakraborty could not have seen this problem coming. It wouldn’t even have been hard to fix. Readers don’t need to understand every aspect of a religion within a story, just the aspects of that are most relevant. All Chakraborty had to do was identify the teachings of Islam that would be needed to make sense of the conflicts and provide practical demonstrations of those beliefs within the text.
I am all for more fiction with a Muslim perspective. I am all for people sharing their beliefs through their work. However, if you are going to market your book for a given audience, you need to understand that audience. You cannot cut corners on the assumption that readers are just going to understand a religion that you know most of them have zero connection to. An audience member failing to connect to a story is a subjective issue. A story that fails to understand its audience is objectively flawed.
The Young Adult Demographic: For the Kids
The Audience
Target age demographics are complex things. This is especially true in modern American publishing, where literature for youths is broken down into tightly controlled age categories. The target age of a work hinges on everything from the ages of the characters to the complexity of the writing and vocabulary to the potential psychological impact of the content that it contains. What’s more, a book can often be marketed for multiple age categories at the same time. I’ve seen the Young Wizards novels by Diane Duane marketed as both Children’s and Young Adult literature, with the Children’s editions just having different covers and being printed on larger pages. I’ve seen Redwall novels being sold simultaneously in the Fantasy and Children’s sections of the same Barnes & Noble with the exact same covers in both sections.
Chakraborty’s interview with Kirkus leaves little doubt that she wrote this for a Young Adult audience. She was very passionate about writing for the “kids”, “teenagers”, and “young people” of her community. However, even outside of the interview, the fact that this Young Adult is evident from the text itself.
First, there are the tropes. The City of Brass is the story of a young woman with special magical powers who starts as an orphan and learns that she comes from a special magical lineage, which makes her a Chosen One and hands her immense wealth and influence. The inciting incident of this story is her using her powers to summon a smoldering, brooding Bad Boy Love Interest who is utterly devoted to her while also being someone she can fix. She travels to a city overwhelmed with systemic prejudice and finds herself in a position to lead an uprising against the evil monarch. Said monarch is presented as cartoonishly evil. Literacy is leveraged to present the moral divide between the protagonist and antagonist: while the protagonist starts illiterate, she quickly learns and develops a love of reading, while the antagonist remains stubbornly illiterate. The secondary POV (I’ll get into why he isn’t a deuteragonist when we talk about characters) is a conservative and disciplined individual who is set up as a Nice Guy Love Interest, or at least a Platonic Male Best Friend, to oppose the Bad Boy Love Interest. The morality of this book also relied on incredibly low-hanging moral fruit that crosses the line into outrage bait: we are introduced to the strife of an oppressed people via human (or djinn, in this case) trafficking and being shown their sick orphans who are denied hospital care by the aforementioned cartoonish monarch. Said monarch is so uncaring about their plight that he verges into, “You should have thought about that before you became peasants,” territory.
Second, there is the writing style. Chakraborty puts focus on certain aspects of her story while handwaving others. I’ll get into the issues that this causes later on. For now, I’ll just note that the places she chose to put focus – outrage bait, rising sexual tension between the main character and Bay Boy Love Interest, telling the audience about important but potentially slow scenes rather than showing us those scenes – make sense for appealing to a Young Adult audience over a more mature one. An adult audience might want to see deep character struggles and political intrigue, but the Young Adult audience would put more stock in the clear delineations of good and evil (the outrage bait) and the sexual tension. Recall that the journey to Daevabad was pushed as a selling point when it was only 16% of the book; that is when the sexual tension for the romance subplot with Bad Boy Love Interest was ratcheted up. This book ultimately reads like it was written for an audience that wants to dabble in more mature content but lacks the attention span or the experience in literary analysis to engage with books that were expressly written for adult audiences.
The Cut Corner
Tropes are not bad. They can often be what sells a book. Tropes that become so dense that they make the story formulaic can be a problem if you are writing for certain genres, but for others, this is still part of the appeal. As expressed in the Blood Heir review, it’s been my observation that Young Adult audiences are far more forgiving of formulaic writing. I don’t think that having The City of Brass lean so heavily on tropes was a problem while Chakraborty was writing for a Young Adult audience.
Likewise, for an objective literary perspective, there is nothing wrong with prioritizing one element over another. If you are writing for a Young Adult audience, it’s a good idea to pay attention to the things that you know your audience will care about most.
The problem is, again, that Chakraborty needed to do an edit before publishing for an adult audience. I’m not saying that she should have cut the romance subplot or redo the moral axis of the story, but she shouldn’t have handwaved the aspects of this book that would have been more engaging for an adult audience.
Regarding Young Adult
I am not the only one who picked up on The City of Brass being Young Adult from clues in the text. There is a thread of Goodreads about the topic. Pat's Fantasy Hotlist likewise called out the question. YA Fantasy Addicts certainly thought it fell into their wheelhouse, too.
I have seen arguments that this book is a “crossover” between genres, or that it’s adult Fantasy that is “accessible” to the Young Adult audience. As far as I could tell, these arguments boiled down to two core ideas. (There may be other arguments, but I did not see them.)
The protagonist and secondary POV character are both roughly 20 years old, and therefore are outside of the age bracket of Young Adult protagonists.
The book features graphic violence, sexual content and mentions of rape.
The first point is invalidated by the worldbuilding of The City of Brass. The age of consent (i.e. marriage) in Daevabad is 25 years, on account of the longer lifespans of the djinn. This is reinforced multiple times, with both the Nahri and the secondary POV being treated like teenagers by older djinn. Regardless of how biological aging actually scales, Chakraborty has gone out of her way to establish that we are following the equivalent of Young Adult-aged characters for her setting.
The second point, as I mentioned last week, really doesn't hold much water in the modern market. Pornographic content, rape, and all manner of horrific violence are commonplace in Young Adult these days. If anything, The City of Brass is far milder than many Young Adult books that I've read (and bear in mind, most of the Young Adult books I’ve read were more than a decade ago, when there was more restraint about these things).
VIRTUE SIGNALLING
I do not believe that The City of Brass has virtue signaling. In fact, I am confident enough about that to hold up The City of Brass as a case study for how a writer can delve into identity politics without virtue signaling.
As with the analysis of virtue signaling in Jade City, I should note that this conclusion applies to The City of Brass alone. If, in future books, Chakraborty tries to milk virtue out of either of the following inclusions, that would count of virtue signaling for those books, but it would not retroactively change this book’s handling of these ideas.
Muslim Representation
Right off the bat, we can rule out Category 1 virtue signaling for the Muslim representation in this book. The time and place in which the book occurs makes Islam an inseparable part of the world. Furthermore, while Daevabad is a fantastical location, the fact that it is predominantly Muslim is not handled like an Islamic Wakanda. The only times characters or the narrative make a big deal out of other characters being Muslim or not is when it is relevant to the ideological conflict between the Muslim djinn and the pre-Islamic faith of the Daevas (we will get into the distinction between djinn and Daeva later).
Chakraborty makes a big deal out of Muslim representation in her Kirkus interview. She is also, judging by the fact she keeps confessing her race and that she insisted on mentioning privilege, a true believer in progressive identity politics. However, the way that this information is presented does not read like someone who is trying to draw attention to their own virtue. Chakraborty was just being honest about why she wrote this story. Her reasons also didn't boil down to talking points. She had very personal reasons for writing this book. It was very clear than any virtue here was genuine rather than signaled.
Homosexual Representation
The City of Brass features a homosexual romance between a secondary and a tertiary character. I cannot recall any point where this was handled in a way that called attention to the inclusion or to Chakraborty's values. With that said, before I express how it was handled, I do want to acknowledge an argument for how it could be a virtue signal regardless.
Tokenization
The tokenization of non-heterosexual characters has been a thing in Young Adult fiction for quite some time. It is rather convenient how many Young Adult characters have exactly one non-heterosexual friend. The pattern on display reads as if many Young Adult writers are either chasing a diversity quota or fulfilling a fantasy for a Gay Best Friend.
Here's the thing, though: while tokenization is a virtue signal, I don't think that it's reasonable to assume that every inclusion of a non-heterosexual character is tokenization. Even when it is exactly one character or one relationship (which is usually a red flag for a diversity quota), some things can be explained by basic statistics (or, for that matter, an author misunderstanding basic statistics). To assume that every one-off character or relationship is a token character would water down the term and make it meaningless.
Therefore, my policy with these reviews is to only interpret the inclusion of homosexuality (or, indeed, any demographic favored by identity politics) as tokenization if the author calls attention to that inclusion. That’s why, for Son of the Storm, I concluded that Eshme's sexual orientation is not a virtue signal, while the inclusion of Danso's homosexual friends is. The former was not used to call attention to Okungbowa’s own values; the latter was milked for outrage bait while loudly proclaiming his values to the audience.
What Chakraborty Did
The homosexual relationship in the book is very much in the background. Chakraborty must go out of her way to bring it to the audience's attention. It contributes nothing to the overall story.
However, with how it is presented, there is no virtue to be garnered for the author. She doesn't rail against Islamic society for making homosexuality taboo. She doesn't even make a big deal out of the couple needing to hide their relationships, despite the fact that doing so would have made sense in the broader context of the narrative (as one is a djinn and the other is a Daeva). The relationship just exists. There is simply no evidence that I could find that would suggest that this inclusion was a virtue signal.
FOUNDATION WORK
Okay. We’ve finally slogged through all the background needed to contextualize this analysis. Now we can move to the book itself.
The worldbuilding of The City of Brass is its strongest aspect. Chakraborty infused a lot of passion into developing the setting. I lack the expertise or background to comment upon authenticity or what she might have changed, but I can say that I found myself immersed and invested in this world.
This is not to say all the worldbuilding is perfect. There is a gaping sinkhole in it that undermines the plot. We will need to assess the bad along with the good.
It’s all coming next week. I hope to see you all then. Have a good day.
