No spoilers here, so I can’t go into detail, but if you’ve read this book you know several characters have done tings they’re not proud of, some of them worse than others. What a memorable tale of the stars, harrowing exploration and adventure, romance, friendship, and breathtaking mystery.

This trilogy touches on a lot of themes about racism and discrimination based on religion, skin colour and lineage. A hazy black cloud revealed itself to be a swarm of flies, and the ruined Citadel still lay bare to the sky like a scar, its tower half-drowned in the lake. I missed the politics and the characters all being together instead of spread widely across the land. Let me tell you that – while everyone probably has a different opinion on how that love triangle should have been resolved or whether it needed to be there ein the first place – I was more than happy with the ending. A woman who uses her looks to garner insider information, sets up a real estate consulting firm to sell what she knows.However, he had had multiple opportunities to stand up to her when he was the more powerful one and he didn’t. Once again, some of the chapters were incredibly long, there was a chapter that was almost an hour and a half toward the end of the book. Sure to get himself in trouble, Ali is both wonderful and flawed: willing and able to see the cultural horrors perpetuated against the Shafit (half human/half djinn inhabitants of Daevebad), yet unable to see his own prejudices against the Deava (an oppressed djinn race who has their own complicated past plus a tie to the murderous Nahids).

What he did for her in letting her go and walking away… coming full circle to book 1 and the cave they stayed in… oh man. They had such a beautiful platonic friendship, and it really sucks that Chakraborty had to go down that road, especially when it felt super out of place them lusting all over each other when their city was on the brink of war. Ali had his strict religious upbringing and must contend with the awkwardness of the object of his desire being his brother’s wife.He wanted to stop being a warrior controlled by others but he also felt a sense of duty to the Nahids. A richly imagined, stunningly immersive book that takes you into a world of darkly alluring djinn, terrifying monsters and beguiling magic. Instead, she got effectively held hostage, forced into a marriage she didn’t want, and then discovered that her mother is a monster. Back in Daevabad, Dara is questioning himself about the actions that he has taken and starts to struggle with conscience about his past and what he could have done differently.

It’s everything you could want in the conclusion to a trilogy, with heartache, beauty, and excitement to spare. I truly enjoyed seeing Dara and Manizheh struggle with ruling with what they had conquered, and that it didn’t just fall into place and the spiralling effects that came from that. With Nahri having romatic feeling for Dara, being married to Muntadhir, and clearly having feelings for Ali, I just expected more. All of the politics and the world-building was also amazing of course, and I’m definitely going to be on the look-out for more books by this author.I finished The Empire of Gold, the 3rd and final book, in The Daevabad Trilogy… and I might be broken.

The reserved, aloof and second youngest daughter of the chaebol founder and heiress to the business empire, she and Tae-joo get married, although they both don't love each other. The rest of the supernatural world considers them monsters and they are, but they’re also so much more. Nahri plays a secondary character as Dara and Ali grow further into themselves and Jamshid joins the narrative to a fuller degree. The Daevabad trilogy up till this point has been largely confined to either Daevabad or Egypt, so it was pretty cool to get to see Ta Ntry in this book and discover more of the world Chakraborty has created here.But the bloodletting and loss of his beloved Nahri have unleashed the worst demons of Dara’s dark past. I also wouldn’t say that Dara became my favorite character, but I was looking forward to his chapters more because something was actually happening in those. Chakraborty has the same gift Melissa Caruso does for making political conversations thrilling, and there’s a lot of fascinating worldbuilding to explore as the main action (by which I mean Nahri) leaves Daevabad for the first time in one and a half books. Dara has been working with Manizheh and determinedly ignoring her flaws, but here he realizes he can’t do that anymore.