This book, and series more generally, were so profoundly disappointing to me. It had so much promise that failed to deliver in so many different ways. I am extremely grateful that I read Amina al-Sirafi first, because I LOVED that book, and I doubt I would bother to read more from this author if I had read this (incredibly highly reviewed!) series first.

One of the things I liked the most about the first book in the series was that the characters were all complicated, with no one (even Ghassan) as a clear-cut villain or hero. With the re-introduction of Manizeh, that slowly fell by the wayside, and in this book, it felt like the characters became caricatures of who they used to be. Manizeh herself because a cartoonish villain, hell-bent on revenge at the expense of literally everything and everyone around her. Dara was effectively a cardboard cutout, one might even say... simply a tool, a weapon. Which really didn't leave me with any sympathy at all for him as a character. I think the author intended for us to just have three enormous novel lengths of pity for him and his being controlled by evil rather than being able to do what he wanted, but it became so tiresome, especially having so many POV chapters where he just moped around repeating the same things. This was true for Ali and Nahri as well, their internal monologues just got so repetitive and the books were SO LONG.

The biggest problem here for me was that the series was trying to do too much:

-  The first book set up a lot of interesting topics around oppression and who was considered worthy of citizenship and rights in Daevabad. All of that got swept to the side in this book in favor of the clan wars amongst the djinn who *checks notes* all basically believe in blood purity. 
- There was way too much of my least favorite fantasy writing style, where one character expounds at length to ostensibly teach another character about the world but it's really just a sloppy way of getting the information to the reader. I'm still not entirely clear what the past history of the Marid and the Ayaanles is and I read the relevant chapters twice. 
- And speaking of the Marid, they were so cool! But also adding so much about them into an already jam packed series just felt so cluttered. I had been waiting since book one for an answer to why water healed Ali before he fell into the lake, and when the answers finally came in this book, it was woven in with all this other lore that felt like trying to balance an increasingly tall layer cake on too tiny a platter.
- I literally said out loud "aha, here comes peri ex machina" when they finally showed up again.
- The pacing of this book in general was off, but the ending was an absolute abominable slog. The final climactic showdown happens and I looked down and there were still THREE HOURS of narration left in the book?! 😩 
- The final motivations for our mains and the way magic works also felt very inconsistent and muddled. I didn't leave the series feeling like I understood anything about how the new world was going to work. It was a bizarre combination of incredibly hand-wavey while also being a tedious bore of explanation.

Overall, I really expected to love this series, and I think with a lot of tightening and editing, it would have been great. I'm obviously in the minority here since these books each boast a 4+ ⭐ rating. But whew. What a lot of content for very little payoff. I am glad that the author's writing has matured with the new series focusing on adult characters, and I am excited to see how that series plays out, but I'm mostly just glad to have this one in the rear view.