50. The City by Jane Gaskell

Hoo boy okay now things are starting to get weird!  Thematically, The City is very much a continuation of the first two books, with Cija passively suffering from one situation to another, especially at the hands of the two men in her life (her half-brother Smahil and of course Zerd the dragon emperor).  Now we have a new evil man hovering in the shadows, her father, the priest lord of her country.

This one is called The City because it begins with her arriving back to the mainland after fleeing Atlan, finding herself sold (of course) by the captain that was supposed to be bringing her safely away.  She escapes from her first purchaser only to be brought to a brothel by the docks.  She escapes from here as well and sort of welcomed to a suburban home.  There are several adventures with the sisters here that end up making her father aware of her existence so that she is under constant threat.  The first half is all kind of meandering, though with great descriptions of the city (where she lived most of her life but never actually knew, being stuck in a single tower) and the wider politics.

It's the second half where this book gets really, really wild.  I'm going to have to spoiler here because it's too good not to share and most of you sadly will not read this book.  The son of the home where she is staying (and the guy who rescued her from the brothel in the first place) goes missing and they figure that it's the priest's men who took him, so Cija and the sisters try and rescue him.  They get captured and here we get this insane floating pyramid where people are lowered in a net down the middle.  The priest is on a throne here and has an alligator woman as a bride! This is some dark, sick cultish shit.  I hate the priest-lord and love hating him (Gaskell is good at inciting these feelings in the reader without being too blatant about it).

She escapes from that in a crazy battle (so much quick and casual violence in these books) and makes her way back to her tower where this time she is captured by a band of ape-people.  I am guessing sort of neanderthals but they are described as pretty ape-like.  The settings veers strongly into the lost world mode here, which I guess I knew from the beginning but now there are dinosaurs.  One of the ape-men protects her from the others (she was supposed to be for eating) and they are both ostracized from the tribe.  They flee deeper into the jungle and encounter two tyrannosaurus rex who at first get it on (yeah baby dinosaur sex) and then the female eats the male!  You know it's coming when you are reading it as Gaskell seems to be priming the pump with the dino-romp but it's sort of hard to believe.  That's right, she and the ape man get it on! Not only that, but he is gentle and turns out to be the only "man" who treats her right!  I felt very topical in reading this old book now because horny romances of women getting properly satisfied by non-men is a trending topic right now with the upcoming movie Wicker (which looks great, I have to admit).

I'll stop spoiling here beyond saying that the book does not close off any of the major narrative storylines.  I learned that it was not until 10 years later that she finished the fourth and final book, which is next for me.

I've done an even lazier and sloppier job of writing about these books, partly because I am quite busy with work and life (and Draconis) these days, but also because this series is quite complex and worthy of real literary analysis by an actual academic/intellectual.