Title: The River of Silver (The Daevabad Series #4)
Author: S.A. Chakraborty
Genre: Fantasy
Publisher: Harper Collins
Publication Date: 2022
Format: Hardcover
Length: 228 pages

Rating:

The Daevabad Trilogy is one of my favourite series of all-time, so when I heard that Chakraborty had released a fourth and final book with additional stories from Daevabad, I immediately ordered it, and it did not disappoint. This book was quick, but provided a lot of never-before-seen details to side-characters that I felt gave more depth to some of the events within the trilogy.

To enjoy this book, you 100% need to have read the entire Daevabad trilogy first, but if you did read the series and loved it like I did, this book is a wonderful companion. I enjoyed every second of getting to be back in the world that I came to love, and getting to see some of the characters that were close to my heart get the happy endings they deserved was a huge added bonus.

Fair warning: spoilers ahead for anyone who has not read this book or the other books in the Daevabad trilogy.

The Book: The River of Silver by S.A. Chakraborty

The River of Silver is a book comprised of various short stories that took place before, during, and after the Daevabad Trilogy. Told from the perspective of both main and side characters, Chakraborty takes the time to flush out their personalities and major events that there wasn’t time to explore in the original series. The stories mostly unfold chronologically, ending with an alternate epilogue to The Empire of Gold.

It would be impossible to review the actual plot of the book, as it bounces through various times, locations, and characters. I won’t go into details since I don’t want to spoil major plot points from the original trilogy, but I will say the book serves as a perfect companion to the series and a wonderfully thoughtful final chapter to the Daevabad world.

The Review

I love Chakraborty as an author so much that I would literally read anything that she wrote. She’s so adept at building gorgeous universes with enthralling characters that you’re immediately immersed in the stories in a way that makes you not want to come up for air.

Because of this, I was super keen to re-enter the Daevabad world and characters, and The River of Silver was the perfect way to do so.

In the beginning of the book, Chakraborty talks about how flushing out side stories for her characters helps her to better understand who they are in the context of the main piece that she’s writing. Often these stories don’t make the cut in her final works, but I loved that she chose to share them in this format. There were so many wonderful characters in the Daevabad trilogy, and while I thoroughly enjoyed getting to spend time with Dara, Nahri, and Ali, getting to see the perspectives of Manizeh, Jamshid, and Muntadhir in this edition added even more depth to the events of the original series. I’d always felt these characters had been created in a heartfelt way, but getting to spend more time with them, and seeing their origins and what made them who they are packed a really nice punch I wasn’t necessarily expecting.

I also really loved that in this book, we manage to get some closure across all of the characters I’d come to love. I’ll always respect an author’s choice to leave things a little open ended at the end of a series, particularly when the alternative is to write a quick and snappy epilogue that tidies things up prematurely or too quickly, but because this was a whole stand-alone book in addition to the original series, there was time to do justice to those original storylines. It felt like getting to sneak a peek behind the curtain after a really good show has closed and seeing the end that you’d hoped the characters would get.

In order to enjoy this book, you absolutely need to have read the series beforehand, particularly as the stories are spread across all three books, but if you enjoyed the Daevabad trilogy, I think it’s worth picking this one up. I personally loved getting to return to Daevabad one last time, and the format in which Charkaborty makes that happen is perfect.