“City of Blades” by Robert Jackson Bennett

I know this blog has been inundated with movie reviews lately, but I’m still reading books too!

Retired war hero General Turyin Mulaghesh is sent to the city of Voortyashtan on a sort of tour to count down the days until she earns her pension. That’s the official story, anyway – actually, she’s there to covertly investigate a new metal that just might be related to the supposedly dead gods of the Continent, and figure out why the last person sent to investigate the issue ended up missing. Voortyashtan is complicated, though, and there’s a lot more going on than meets the eye.

I enjoyed City of Stairs when I read it last year, but not as much as a lot of other people. Mulaghesh was one of my favourite characters in the book, though, so I was pretty thrilled that she was going to be the protagonist of City of Blades. She does not disappoint – she’s a curmudgeonly one-armed war hero that’s unabashedly competent and won’t take any nonsense from anybody. She starts off the book pretty tired and lost, but once she enters problem solving mode, there’s no one I’d rather have on the case. She’s got a unique perspective and it never gets tiring to look through it. I would read a whole series of books about Mulaghesh.

City of Blades starts off with a pretty similar premise to the first book – a Saypuri is sent to a hostile Continental city to investigate possible Divine intervention – but it quickly evolves into its own thing. It helps that it doesn’t have to do all the worldbuilding that City of Stairs had to; the world of these books is complicated, and it was good to be familiar with how it all worked. The world does get extended, but in a very natural way. The martial Voortya is a pretty interesting god to explore, and Mulaghesh is the perfect person to understand her.

The new characters introduced in this book are pretty cool, especially Sigrud’s engineer daughter Signe. Sigrud is back as well, and he seems much more like a real person, which was great. I was a little bit frustrated with the character arcs of the villains – I can’t say more without spoilers, but I wished that they were less stereotypical. It’s a minor flaw in an otherwise terrific book, though.

I’m looking forward to the third book, City of Miracles – I think that’s going to be the last book. Sigrud is going to be the protagonist, which I’m more excited about thanks to his development in City of Blades.

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