The City of Dusk (The Dark Gods, #1)
Tara Sim
The Four Realms—Life, Death, Light, and Darkness—all converge on the city of dusk. For each realm there is a god, and for each god there is an heir. But the gods have withdrawn their favor from the once vibrant and thriving city. And without it, all the realms are dying. Unwilling to stand by and watch the destruction, the four heirs—Risha, a necromancer struggling to keep the peace; Angelica, an elementalist with her eyes set on the throne; Taesia, a shadow-wielding rogue with rebellion in her heart; and Nik, a soldier who struggles to see the light— will sacrifice everything to save the city. But their defiance will cost them dearly. Set in a gorgeous world of bone and shadow magic, of vengeful gods and defiant chosen ones, The City of Dusk is the first in a dark epic fantasy trilogy that follows the four heirs of four noble houses—each gifted with a divine power—as they form a tenuous alliance to keep their kingdom from descending into a realm-shattering war.
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0 0**I was provided an electronic ARC from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for honest review.**
Tara Sim returns with the ambitious first book of an epic fantasy series, The City of Dusk. Sim has created a world of multiple coinciding realms and those realms are accompanied by an incredible amount of species, cultural, and magical diversity. Sim utilizes multiple POVs, one for each of the heirs of their magical Houses, plus a couple bonus POVs every now and again. When politics of the humans, politics of the gods, and individual motivations all enter the playing field at once, we get one enormous clash of powers.
I will first say that I have mixed feelings about this novel. If all of that in the overview paragraph sounds like a lot, it's because it absolutely is. The beginning is slow. There is a lot of info-dumping about the magic systems, the world, the Houses and their members and the politics of it all. It's a whole lot. It's all very interesting and cleverly designed, but learning about it was dense. Every time we established an interesting plot point, we switched perspective where we had an entire new set of info-dumping for THAT character. The sheer density made me want to soft DNF and come back later when I had more mental spoons to process the information, despite the fact that nothing that was happening was bad. It just was too slow for what I wanted.The plot and the pacing and the rhythm of the book didn't really set in until 50%.
Once the plot set in, everything was great. Good pacing from there, good reveals of information, good progress along the various interweaving plot lines. Tons of intrigue. The various queer identities were woven in seamlessly and every single character was both representative of their gender identity, sexuality, cultural identity, but also much more than that. Every single character including side characters were fully realized with motivations, histories, and experiences of their own which drove their personalities and behaviors.
So how did a book that started out as a shaky 3 star read wind up 4 stars? In the end, I like the characters, I like the world, I like the magic, and I want to read the next book. And it is my most sincere hope that we do not have to wade through the information about the world again in book two.
I am grateful to have had the opportunity to read this book early, and am excited for the potential for something great as this series unfolds.
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