mara’s Reviews > The City of Brass > Status Update

I hate when books pit the female characters against each other. You get the girl who's a clumsy tomboy "not like other girls" girl who, upon meeting the other one, is instantly envious of her, the graceful, feminine, girly girl. Such a boring trope, can we get a little bit more variety in here.
I can't remember a single time I was jealous on site??? like GOLLYYY writers make their female characters so immature

But it all paled compared to the platter in front of her.
this is so odd, why not just use the normal phrase "paled in comparison to"? The writing is lowk so clunky at times.

"Surely you don't mean to say you spent the last fourteen centuries as a slave?"
no freaking way is he OLDER than 1,400 years. this romance is getting worse and worse. how old IS THIS GRANDPA

Dara could pass as a man in his thirties, and he was older than her civilization.
😭😭😭😭 how is this not the weirdest love interest for a book to have. She's eighteen, crushing on someone that not only LOOKS THIRTY but is actually fourteen HUNDRED years old - older than her ENTIRE CIVILIZATION

"Something's going on here. Something we know nothing about."
I SWEAR the dialogue in this book is SO STUPID. duh there's stuff going on that you know nothing about:
1) you've never been to this city
2) you JUST GOT HERE. every single thing that happens is gonna be something you know nothing about
ugh this book is so braindead sometimes

"This looked like a cross between a riot and the Hajj."
how in the world would she know what the Hajj looks like, wasn't she dirt-poor in Cairo? how would she ever have the means to travel to Mecca and actually see/experience a crowd like that?

when his brother takes him underground, and Ali opens one of the scrolls, it says he "glanced at the next page". Scrolls don't have pages. They're scrolls. It's one continuous page.

The sunlight flashed off the dizzying black and gold designs
doesn't black usually ABSORB light? how would black even be dizzying anyway

she'd just spent a month with this man
girl you barely know him. Esp considering he's 1400+ years old, a month is NOTHING to him.

"This is completely inappropriate."
He was right, of course. Not about being inappropriate, Nahri had never much cared about that.
religious girls care a LOT about that, esp the ones religious enough to wear headscarves