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The Value of a Star: Ratings Explained

City of Last Chances (The Tyrant Philosophers, #1)
By: Adrian Tchaikovsky
My Rating: Four out of Five Stars
Best For: 18 and up

City of Last Chances by Adrian Tchaikovsky | Expert World-Building or Head-Spinning Complexity? Yes!

For some reason it often takes me much longer to love Adrian Tchaikovsky’s fantasy offerings even though I tend to have love-at-first-sight affairs with his science fiction.

It took me a little while to wrap my head and heart around the happenings in this one. It’s odd and weird and a bit warped, and full of strange and often unlikable characters inhabiting a strange and decidedly unpleasant city that is teetering on the verge of major unrest, waiting for the tiny spark that will set the story on a crash course with revolution. There’s magic – it’s fantasy after all – but really it’s more of a veneer for the social divisions and bureaucratic oppression musings. It feels like a much darker, much more ‘Adult’ version of Leigh Bardugo’s Ketterdam. If you liked the idea of a city run by gangs, magic, and secrets, but you want the training wheels taken off and the complexity dialed up to eleven, this is the graduation point. You can feel the tension in the streets, and you know a revolt is coming—it’s just a matter of who’s going to light the fuse.

“We can’t bring perfection to the world without the threat of force. We can’t rely on the threat of force unless they know we will follow up on it.”

It’s not a place to see through any kind of rosy shades. It touches on colonialism and oppression, exploitation and subjugation, naive youthful fervor and cynical calculated greed. It won’t give you the well-deserved feel-good moments of triumph of the good and comeuppance for the bad, or the bright future following some glorious Revolution. Tchaikovsky seems more of a realist than an optimist here, although there is a bit of dark humor at times.

But don’t expect your usual heroes and heroics. Those don’t pay off. It’s a place for those who work for self-interest, and all we can hope is that at some point it may align with what may be the lesser of evils. And don’t expect hand-holding and exposition – you are in the middle of it all, and Tchaikovsky expects you to figure it all out, and with a bit of an effort you certainly can, and enjoy it, too.

The greyish characters often shown in intentionally unflattering light, the ever-shifting POVs, the web of narrative threads and the lack of feel-good vibes in a weird oppressive city do make this book tough to enjoy at first, but the further and further I got in this story the more I found myself taken in by the narrative and that seeming ease with which Tchaikovsky weaves all these narrative strands together. This one to me is one of his better fantasy works, and I fully intend to keep going with this series.

Just give me six months or so to recover.

Content Guide for Parents & Discerning Readers:

Age Recommendation: 18+ (Adult Fantasy)
Language: Some strong (5 F-words, 1 Sh-word)
Violence: High. It’s a city under occupation; expect gritty descriptions of conflict, oppression, and magical “bad decisions.”
Sexual Content: Minimal, but the themes are mature and dark.

The Verdict:

4 Stars. Go for it if you love deep, symphonic fantasy and don’t mind a challenge. Skip it if you’re looking for a linear, “hero’s journey” story and don’t feel like melting your brain.

Happy Reading!