I love Tara Sim. She is so outstanding in her world building and storytelling. This book was no different!

Unlike many other multiple POVs I have read, they all came together fairly quickly. The storylines were not completely separate the entire time and I appreciated that. It is sometimes hard for me to focus when there is so much going on.

And there was a lot going on in this book. I found the idea of magic to be incredibly unique and interesting. I hate to compare books but it did give me shadow and bone vibes with the cohesiveness of the storytelling. I also love anything mythological, so it was a perfect setting as well!

Before I get into the bulk of the review, I want to say a quick thank you to NetGalley and the publishers over at Orbit for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review. The City of Dusk is the first book in a brand new series set in a world of vengeful gods, chosen ones, and magic of darkness and light. In this Fantasy world, The Four Realms--Life, Death, Light, and Darkness--all converge on the city of dusk. For each realm there’s a god, for each god there’s an heir. But the gods have withdrawn their favor from the once vibrant and thriving city...and without it, all the realms are dying. The City of Dusk comes out on March 22nd and is available for preorder now.
The premise for this book got me and I had to immediately request an ARC. I was sad to say that while it’s an okay book, it didn’t hit all the things I was looking for. I’m completely open to the possibility that this is a me thing and not a book thing. I’ve recently had a lot of IRL chaos and the burnout might be causing me to rate this one lower. I know this has some amazing ratings on GoodReads so I’m willing to accept that this might have nothing to do with the book. But, to me, the world building was lacking. I thought that there wasn’t enough of a foundation for me to completely wrap my head around everything going on. And that’s another major point about this book: there are so many different political machinations here from what the gods want, what the people want, what the king wants, what the houses want. It’s a lot. It felt like the book was having a bit of an identity crisis at times.

I really enjoyed seeing a diversity of LGBTQIA+ characters in this one without it trying to beat you over the head about being LGBT+. And I enjoyed seeing the different types of magic in this world. I just wish there was more set up at the beginning for the different types of magic and the different lore surrounding the different types of magic. I loved the familiars that a few of the characters had. I’d love to see more of that. And even the two demons we saw in this book were...cute? Or at least not supremely evil? But I can anthropomorphize anything so that could just be me. The few things I would recommend to help make this book better: a solid map at the front, a solid reference for the families and/or lore surrounding the different types of magic, and clarity around different characters’ desires.

Overall, I would say this book is for people who don’t read a ton of Fantasy novels. I think if you’re new to the genre then this is a great stepping stone and it’s something I think you’d really enjoy. Also, the age ranges here would probably be good from upper YA to Adult so I think it would be easy for this book to find its perfect audience.

I haven't read a long book in awhile, but this one was quite lovely. We hop between 6+ PoV's, spending major time in about 5 of them. This had the potential to be overwhelming, but Tara Sim managed it nicely. It's honestly really hard for me to pick a favorite character, though it might be a toss-up between Taesia and Nik. Or maybe Julian. Agh! I did run into some confusion at times with the world and certain characters, but I think that was fully intentional. It was twisty, dynamic, and full of representation across sexualities, races, and neurodivergence. This really reads like an epic D&D campaign tailored for a New Adult audience and I love it so much.

*Thank you to Orbit and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review*

Loved this book! The world is very interesting (although slightly confusing) and I love Sim's unique spin on magic. The characters are absolutely phenomenal and I loved watching their journeys throughout the story.
The only con for me was with the ending. It seemed like a lot of pieces got thrown on the board without enough build-up - but maybe I just missed the clues?

I absolutely loved The City of Dusk. It is easily one of the best books I've read lately. While the author does a spectacular job of world building, for me, the highlight of the book is the characters. Tara Sim creates a diverse and complex set of characters with tragic histories, complicated relationships, and unique personalities. Each of the main characters is well-developed (I honestly can't pick a favorite), and even the supporting characters add a lot to story. The plot is intriguing with quite a few twists that I did not see coming. The book is well-paced with multiple POVs, allowing the reader to get to know the characters better. While the book was long, I found myself not wanting it to end. I cannot wait for the next in the series. The City of Dusk is definitely a five star read, and I will be recommending it to everyone I know that enjoys reading fantasy.

3 stars

I adored the premise of this novel but it was very lacking. the world building was mediocre, we get told the names of things but never really explained what exactly they are. we don't really know much about the place the story is set in due to the odd way climate is dealt with. overall the world just felt very... reused? it's all things we have already seen before just melt together.

for an adult book the writing was very reminiscent of YA. many of the descriptions just left me very confused. there were many weird catchphrases that are supposed to be fun I suppose but just annoyed me.

for the most part i liked the plot and characters, which is what really saved this book for me. i'm not sure how to feel about this book overall but it was definitely interesting.

thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

The City of Dusk was one of my most anticipated books of the year and there were some things I really liked and some things that didn't work as well as I'd hoped. For reference, this is an adult fantasy book that feels a lot more like young adult, so I think it will appeal to new adult readers and people trying to make the transition between YA and adult.

First, some of the things I really liked. There is a lot of very casual queer representation in this book (meaning it's not a coming out story and there's no homophobia or anything). The ending came together in a really engaging way and I found myself holding my breath during some of the finale scenes. There's quite a bit of worldbuilding, both with the political and cultural setting of each region as well as all the gods themselves. I felt like this information was incorporated pretty well without feeling overwhelming or awkward.

A few things didn't work for me. Most importantly, this book seemed way too long and my attention frequently wandered, especially towards the beginning. I also found it difficult to fully connect with the characters because there were so many points of view and it switched too often to settle into one narrative.

Overall, I have mixed feelings about this book, but I would still recommend checking it out if the premise seems interesting to you. The ending gives the impression that the sequel will be a wild ride and I think this series will probably appeal to many readers!

Thank you to NetGalley and Orbit for providing this eARC to review!

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for a chance to read an ARC of this book!
Ever since Tara Sim announced this book, I have been dying to read--and The City of Dusk did not disappoint! Sim always does such a spectacular job with creating incredible worlds and complex characters. I loved every page of this story and every moment in this world. Can't wait to buy a copy in stores!

This book is rather long, but in the best way possible. I loved learning about how this world works and how the characters navigate throughout. The plot itself moves along at a steady pace and there are many twists and turns that I didn’t see coming, while others I was able to guess. However, that didn’t detract from my favorite element of this story: the characters. For this fantasy realm, the characters are what drove up my enjoyment so high in this story. I loved their interactions, their histories, their rivalries, and their chemistries.

Ultimately this book is an excellent start to what I hope will be a solid fantasy trilogy. I love the dark aesthetic and the agency that each character has to make their choices and face their consequences that don’t feel overly plot-driven.

A full review will be out on armedwithabook.com on March 2nd. A big thank you to Orbit and Netgalley for providing me this book in exchange for an honest review!

This book gave me Grisha Trilogy/ Young Elites vibes, which I am not mad about! Good world building, I liked the different POVs and the plot moved along nicely. I am a HUGE fan of visuals in fantasy novels. I need details of the Worlds to really immerse myself in the story and this did not disappoint.

While this book may be marketed to adults, it sadly reads as very young.
Characters are diverse, in sexuality and ethnicity.

On paper, this is everything I want in a fantasy novel -- multiple perspectives, meaningful and non-tokenizing diversity, interesting system of magic, slow build -- and Tara Sim definitely writes beautifully. However, this novel doesn't work for me and I've opted to DNF at 20%. I don't tend to DNF fiction that early unless it's for 'content warnings' related reasons (which wasn't the case here at all!), but with this novel being as long as it is, I'm opting not to keep going. This is very much a character driven book and I just... couldn't find a way to care about the characters or their relationships with each other *at all.* I also question the classification of this book as 'adult' rather than YA. I'm hesitant to give this a low rating because it's well written and there is definitely an audience for it; I'm just not that audience.

God, this book did so many things right. The worldbuilding, the influence from other cultures and then respectfully and integrating it so seamlessly into storyline was *chefs kiss*. As an Indian, the casual references to traditional clothing literally sent me. It feels rare and undone to be represented this thoroughly and casually represented like this in a fantasy book and I enjoyed every minute of it. Any question I had in my head about the worldbuilding - why do certain things happen, how does stuff in this world work - was answered, which I feel like is rare in fantasy books. Sometimes I will ask myself how the in heck does this make sense and then Tara explains it! I love that. I am a detail oriented person and I ate this shit up.

I know I am giving it 4 stars, but in reality I think I would give it a 3.75. The only drawback this book had was the pacing of it and the subsequent length of it. Until the last 10% of the book, the pacing was relatively slow steady and I will be honest - I was not on the edge of my seat while reading this until the end. It hurts me to even take away stars for that because there's so so so much this book did right, but I wish there was a sense of urgency in the book. Also, I was able to predict almost every single one of the plot twists in this books but I am also the person that typically picks up the little breadcrumbs and love guessing. They weren't over your head obvious, but I do think some can be picked up a little more easily than others.

Despite those two things, I loved the characters and the complexity of them, and all the nuisances they have. They all felt very relatable and morally complex. They felt like very real, very understandable characters, which I feel like isn't often done to feel this...raw. The writing is beautiful too - some descriptions were so pretty, I wanted to screenshot and frame them. Everything in the book was so complex too, like the politics. Everything was so nuanced, which I love. Also the dedication - absolutely hilarious. I love it. Such a girlboss move.

I want to thank Tara Sim and Orbit Books for the opportunity to read this ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

A deep and engaging read, with a complex and well-built world. The tales of the heirs wove together beautifully and I felt myself rooting for each of them more and more as the novel went on!

In the City of Dusk, Nexus is a nexus for the Four Realms – Life, Death, Light, and Darkness; each are ruled by a god and represented by a House. For reasons seemingly unspecified, the gods have withdrawn their favour the effect is catastrophic for the respective realms. Unwilling to be bystanders in their own demise, the four House heirs’ team up to save their city.

If you like vivid and rich worldbuilding, intriguing magic systems, and a diverse band of misfits (can they be misfits if they’re technically noble?) in a high fantasy world – this book is for you.

I want to start by saying the concept for this book is so cool and what primarily sold me on reading this ARC. It’s my first Tara Sim book, but fantasy is one of my favourite genres and the synopsis really sold me.

I really only have three critiques, and they are all for my personal preference:

First, I believe this book is marketed or tagged as adult fiction, when really I think it would do better as YA. The characters are in their early 20s, but their characterization reminds me more of those in YA novels. I think aging down the characters slightly – to perhaps 18/19 – would be more consistent in their characterization and behaviour.

Second, I found the chapters to be excruciatingly long. The description was really intensive, and while at times that was fantastic, other times it bogged down the reading experience. Add in that there were several different POVs happening simultaneously and it was sometimes difficult to stay engaged.

Lastly, and this point kind of builds on the previous one, I think a good portion of this book could have been edited down; to about 420-450 pages. This is the first book in a series, so I totally understand and appreciate the necessity of good worldbuilding, flushing out characters (especially in a multi-POV book), etc. However, there is a difference between need and want when including some info/scenes and I think <i>The City of Dusk</i> pushed that envelope a little too far.

I’m not sure at this point if I will continue with the series because of my current opinions on the structure/writing of book one, however the story is intriguing me enough to consider giving book two a shot when it is released.

I would recommend this book to others with the prelude that the main thing is the writing isn’t bad, there’s just <i>a lot</i> of it.

<i>Thank you to NetGalley and Orbit for providing me with an ARC of this book in return for an honest review.</i>

Well...this was definitely a book! It took me 80 years to sludge through the first 20% of the novel, only to realize that I didn't like it at all and I wasn't going to force myself to read anymore of it. This book felt very "The Atlas Six", which is to say it felt underdeveloped and confusing most of the time. I don't mind doorstopper fantasy novels, but holy moly - trying to keep what felt like 10 different characters straight over a 500 page arc was impossible.

I do think this series will likely appeal to a lot of younger fantasy readers, but it was not for me.

I will not be publishing my review to my blog as I did not finish the book.

Thank you NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

"The City of Dusk" is an ambitious novel -- I would almost say too ambitious for its confines. With 7 point of view characters (albeit some used sparingly) and 500 pages to tell an epic story of a god vs god political battle reflected in a man-vs-man political battle... it has to make sacrifices to fit that all in without the book doubling or tripling in size. The writing is often very plain (he did x, he did y, she felt z), with descriptions cut, and relationships are often gestured at more than developed (for example, Julian's interpersonal relationship with Paris is very important for the interiority of what happens with Julian, but we never actually see it developed in any way). It trims all the fat from the book to fit into one book at all. And while I'd rather have a book that's too ambitious instead of one that's not ambitious enough, and while I very much enjoyed this, I do think it suffers for it at times.

The main area it struggles with this is that a number of things are left vague or just directly handed to the plot when they could have benefited from growing out of the characters interiority more. Sim still does make all the main characters' needs and motivations tied into the plot, don't get me wrong, but it's written like we're watching it happen to the characters more than like we're experiencing it with them. The result of this is that when there are contradictions, it's not always clear if it's for expediency, or if it's meant to read as deliberate, such as with a character's hypocrisy (for example - at one point Risha refuses to give a friend some bone shards for magical purposes as it'd be immoral to take them from the dead, but later she is walking around with some human bone shards she'll magically attack with if she needs to, and this contradiction isn't mentioned in the text). Likewise, a lot of the twists are discovered by the characters through chance or other characters expositing at them, while I feel that if they'd actively investigated and their actions led to them uncovering the information it would have been stronger. And because of this, it wasn't always clear why these characters were telling each other things -- why Taesia would include Angelica (who she doesn't get along with) in the information sharing early on, why Jas would talk to Risha so openly, etc. The setups for these are quick and brief and relies on the reader to take it on faith because we don't have a lot of time to build out the reasonings.

That said, I liked it, don't get me wrong! I think this was less a weakness inherent in the writing and more a deliberate trade off that was made to still include everything Sim wanted to fit into the first book, which is epic and exciting, and decisions like that will always have parts that work and parts that don't. While it's possible that other developmental edits could have been made to focus down and expand these areas I mentioned, there would have had to be different trade offs to do so, and I don't know if it could have pulled off the intense and exciting sequences through the last third of the book if it had focused more on the minutia and less on the epic.

I enjoyed the worldbuilding quite a bit. The mythology was strong, and flavored the entire world, and I genuinely felt like these characters could have come from it. Yes, there were occasional vaguenesses in it that I see other reviewers have mentioned. But imo it did as much specificity or more than many fantasy novels, and if there was some disjoint between understanding how (for example) exactly the system of government worked and how they got things done, this is super common in fantasy. And I'm way more reluctant to put weight on those handwaved spots in an Asian-centric fantasy, lol! We as Western readers are more ready to handwave certain elements of worldbuilding in Western fantasy that we vaguely 'recognize' from media, and the fact that we may not recognize the similar gaps in another setting may be less on the author and more on our own upbringing.

I'm really intrigued by the point this book leaves off and I definitely plan to read the next one.

3.5 stars, rounded up.

"Inside his chest his heart still throbbed, reminding him he was alive, alive, monstrous but alive."

This story had so many quotes that expressed the exact extent of the situation the characters were in. I absolutely loved the writing.

The story follows the city of dusk ruled by four houses, each led by a god and their heir. When the gods step away from the city, the heirs must work together in order to save it but at a cost.

One thing I will mention is that the storyline was kind of tricky to follow for a majority of the book because of how many characters there were. It seemed like I constantly had to go back and reread certain parts or even chapters to understand what was happening, or who was doing what.

Overall, I believe that this was a very solid fantasy read and am very excited to see where the author takes this series next!

First, thanks to NetGalley and Orbit for the eARC!

This book was a wild ride. It's very big and very ambitious and also, in my opinion, very cool. The variety of magic systems and dynamics between the characters were delightful, and I thought the ~reveal~ at the end was very clever.

The City of Dusk is somewhere between new adult and adult fantasy. There were a handful of slightly rougher patches which read more like YA (this is not a YA book though!!) but I think that mostly has to do with the fact this is an adult debut, and these rough spots didn't detract from the overall story. I also think that it really evened out in the last part, so I think by the time the second book in the series comes out it will be a non-issue.

The beginning of this book pulled me in, and while I thought maybe the middle two parts dragged just a bit, by the time I got to the last quarter of the book I flew through it in a frenzy because I was really intrigued, and looking back on it I think even though there were parts that dragged, they ultimately paid off, so I cannot complain. My only real complaint is that, at times, I had to remind myself that these characters are in their early twenties, and are not teenagers. But, again, I think Sim has found her footing and I'm very excited to see what the next book will bring. Also: I was really into the queer rep in this book. It was exactly what I wanted from a book, any book, during the time period I read this.

Ultimately, I think this was a really good debut into adult fantasy, and again, I'm really excited for the next installment!

Really enjoyed this queer fantasy ~odyssey~ that Tara Sim took on - it was a fun (dark, so dark) read that was surprisingly quick given the length. I wish there had been more descriptive language over the dialogue-heavy content of the book, which is new for me, but I felt like I had a bit of trouble keeping track of what, exactly, was going on sometimes.