A review by jarrahpenguin
The Empire of Gold by S.A. Chakraborty

5.0

The third and longest book in the Daevabad Trilogy was so exciting I powered through the last 350+ pages an an afternoon. Ultimately I was really happy with the series and mostly satisfied with the ending. In terms of this instalment, my highlights were:

Spoiler

1) Zaynab, Aqisa and Fiva being amazing and badass.
2) The description of scenes in Cairo and of the Ayaanle court in Ta Ntry.
3) Dara's character arc - several characters go through a process of realizing they can choose their own paths, and not merely follow what others see as their destinies - but Dara's was most interesting and nuanced for me.
4) Nahri's reconnection with her family history.
5) Muntadhir is just a great character and I'm glad he and Jamshid have a happy ending even if we could've seen more of them and their relationship.

A few things that I liked less were:

1) Manizheh became a bit of a cartoon villain with the sheer awfulness of what she did. Maybe it was hard to figure out where to go to make her character more of a threat after she'd already attempted genocide? It took away from the repeated assertions that she was only this way because of her awful upbringing. I also didn't love the torture scenes. Reminded me of Game of Thrones where you definitely already know someone is bad and don't necessarily need to see the details of multiple examples of such.
2) I appreciate Nahri setting priorities other than sex/men, but also wished she'd got to enjoy herself a bit more.
3) While it's ok for characters' plans to be foiled every now and then, I wished that Jamshid, Nahri and Ali had found something interesting and meaningful in the library in Ta Ntry after all the excitement about it.