Brief Synopsis
“City of Gold” is the fourth book in the Aru Shah series by Roshani Chokshi, and sees Aru Shah struggling to grapple with the war against her father, the evil Sleeper.
Content Warnings: Violence (PG)
What Do I Think?
This review is hard. Up until now, I have been singing Chokshi’s praises with the Aru Shah series, and for good reason! These books are incredibly good. However, after reading “City of Gold,” I cannot help but feel…disheartened.
“City of Gold” is the first book where I felt the series has faltered.
Let me start by saying that Chokshi’s writing when it comes to Aru’s voice and the depth of how she has characters grow emotionally is top-notch. Frankly, this book sees the characters – especially Aru – grow a lot, far more in the previous novels in this series. The action remains fast-paced (yet accessible), the world-building takes the cake…honestly, for most of this novel, I read it thinking I would be writing another review just like my previous one where all I could really say was good things. But there’s one big, glaring issue that brought the book down by a lot, in my opinion.
“City of Gold” has an epilogue problem.
By that I mean that its epilogue is nearly 50 pages, extremely long for a novel of any length. Some might argue that this isn’t really an epilogue at all – just another facet of the primary story, but it doesn’t come across that way. By this point in the story, the Pandavas have claimed a victory, met their primary objective for the book, and are home happy. The epilogue spans nine months of time to get to a specific date, and ultimately it all feels very arbitrary – there is a serious case of “hand of the author” happening so that specific events can happy in a certain way. This is an issue the first Aru Shah book had, too – it desperately wants to end on a certain note, but with the main conflict resolved it has to do some acrobatic legwork to get there.
In this case, “City of Gold” wants to leave you with a sense of hopeful dread – the heroes are left in a bad state, but with the glimmer of possibility that they might come out of this successfully. Yet one cannot help but wonder if this overlarge epilogue couldn’t have simply started the next novel, and instead merely ended with a feeling of anticipation of the doom to come.
Overall, “City of Gold” is still a solid addition to the Aru Shah series, and most of the book is a delightful read that anyone who’s made it this far will enjoy. Unfortunately, the novel is hindered by an ending that feels out of place with the rest of the story, and leaves me with a dread about what is to come in the final chapter of this epic series.
Jacob Ryckman 