Sigrud lives

Bit late writing this one up, since I technically finished Robert Jackson Bennett's City of Miracles yesterday. But since I wanted nothing more than a nice nap when I got home yesterday....

Anyway, this supposedly being his final book in the Divine Cities trilogy, I found it was less of a trilogy and more like a musical Rondo, as this book returns to many of the themes and scenes as the first book after a completely different second installment.

We start by meeting Sigrud in a logging camp several years after the events that ended City of Blades. What brings him out of his self imposed exile is news that Shara (former Prime Minister of Saypur, hero of City of Stairs, Sigrud's mentor) has been assassinated in Bulikov.

Sigrud takes it upon himself to find Shara's killer and bring justice to him. Which honestly happens fairly quickly, except for the fact that finding the killer leads him further into a much deeper plot involving things Aunt Vinya did prior to the start of the series, and indeed things that date back to the time before the Blink, when the Divinities died.

On the bright side, Mother Mulaghesh shows up a few times, now serving as opposition party leader in the Upper house of Saypur's parliament.

Much of what the plot revolves around in the idea that the divinities had children, either with each other or with mortals...leading to complications in the modern age, since Jukov, the trickster, made the children forget their divine heritage in order to protect them when the Divinities died. As such, one of the children, Nokov, the embodiment of the First Night, who was also tortured by Aunt Vinya in her misguided attempt to give Saypur a Divinity,  is running around, finding his Divine siblings and cousins and essentially eating them to become a full fledged Divinity.

It takes much of the book for the full scope of everything to become clear, most of which is Sigrud coming to terms with his own checkered past, and his remorse over the death of Signe, his daughter in the last book. Along the way, we find out what actually happened to him in the prison he was in before Shara rescued him and the greater meaning of the miracle that scarred him.

Along the way, we get exciting chase scenes, including an extended run along a fast moving people mover suspended by cables over the snow covered mountains.

Several themes get revisted here, the biggest of which seems to be Sigrud's personal "It's easy to find a cause to die for, it's much harder to find one to live for." We also get "How do we end the endless cycle of of pain inflicted upon each generation?" and "What exactly is Divinity?"

Phenomenal book. Phenomenal Series.