A handful of Arabian nights
Aug. 21st, 2024 12:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileAbout ten years ago, someone I knew through my writing group had a book published, and they had a book event in conjunction with a few other authors. In an abundance of social awkwardness/wanting to be supportive I bought the book being advertised of each of the four authors, the other three of whom I had not heard of. One of these books was The Wrath and the Dawn, a YA fantasy (they were all YA fantasies) from then-debut author Renee Ahdieh.
My honest to god opinion is that I should have read this book when I first bought it ten years ago, because I would have had a much higher tolerance for its general YA-ness at the time.
The book is, roughly, a retelling of the tale of Scheherazade, although in this one our heroine Shahrzad only has to tell about one and a half stories before other plot stuff intervenes to keep her alive. Shahrzad volunteers to become the bride of the murderous boy-king Khalid because he married and then killed her best friend, and Shahrzad intends to stay alive long enough to figure out how to kill the king. This gets derailed because Shahrzad also falls in love with the king, and figures out the secret reason he had been killing all those girls, in that order. There is much heterosexual angst when Shahrzad finds herself falling in love with her best friend’s killer, who doesn’t seem like a psychotic madman. This might have sat better with me if it didn’t take all of three days to happen, but whatever. If this were message fiction we would have to be very concerned about what message we are sending to young girls about handsome young men who do terrible things but don’t seem like total psychos, but this is not message fiction, this is a heterosexual power fantasy about the power of teenage love (and not really storytelling, which is odd for a Scheherezade adaptation) to overcome all obstacles, presumably including breaking curses in the sequel. Shahrzad is also a master archer, although this doesn’t end up being quite as relevant to the plot as I’d hoped.
The writing style is a bit overwritten in the way that YA so often is, where there are too many descriptive words but the result isn’t writing that’s dense, just sort of loose. I had more patience for this before spending years as a copy editor and now it’s hard to turn off the part of brain that wants to cut the extraneous words from every sentence, so at least for the first few chapters I had a constant running internal monologue that was just like “You don’t have to say ‘grains of sand,’ you can just say ‘sand,’ the default way sand comes is in grains” but once I got more engaged in the action-adventure stuff that voice moved more to the back of my head. The book is nearly 400 pages long and took me about half a day to read, so it’s fair to say the extra description didn’t slow me down too much.
Apart from our feisty but easily seduced heroine, the only other female character in the book who shows up for more than three pages is her Greek handmaiden, who appears to exist mostly to be more normal than Shahrzad but they’re still friends so we can show that this author doesn’t hate women, despite the otherwise all-male cast. We are not going to resolve the age-old question of “Is feminism when you chase boys” in this book review, so I will only say that this book was a bit too heterosexual for me personally, which is why I don’t read as much straight people romantasy stuff as I used to.
Overall this book isn’t bad for the type of book it is, but it doesn’t exactly transcend the genre, and this is no longer quite my genre the way it used to be. It is unlikely I will read the sequel unless it basically falls into my lap, but I wouldn’t particularly object to reading it if it does.
My honest to god opinion is that I should have read this book when I first bought it ten years ago, because I would have had a much higher tolerance for its general YA-ness at the time.
The book is, roughly, a retelling of the tale of Scheherazade, although in this one our heroine Shahrzad only has to tell about one and a half stories before other plot stuff intervenes to keep her alive. Shahrzad volunteers to become the bride of the murderous boy-king Khalid because he married and then killed her best friend, and Shahrzad intends to stay alive long enough to figure out how to kill the king. This gets derailed because Shahrzad also falls in love with the king, and figures out the secret reason he had been killing all those girls, in that order. There is much heterosexual angst when Shahrzad finds herself falling in love with her best friend’s killer, who doesn’t seem like a psychotic madman. This might have sat better with me if it didn’t take all of three days to happen, but whatever. If this were message fiction we would have to be very concerned about what message we are sending to young girls about handsome young men who do terrible things but don’t seem like total psychos, but this is not message fiction, this is a heterosexual power fantasy about the power of teenage love (and not really storytelling, which is odd for a Scheherezade adaptation) to overcome all obstacles, presumably including breaking curses in the sequel. Shahrzad is also a master archer, although this doesn’t end up being quite as relevant to the plot as I’d hoped.
The writing style is a bit overwritten in the way that YA so often is, where there are too many descriptive words but the result isn’t writing that’s dense, just sort of loose. I had more patience for this before spending years as a copy editor and now it’s hard to turn off the part of brain that wants to cut the extraneous words from every sentence, so at least for the first few chapters I had a constant running internal monologue that was just like “You don’t have to say ‘grains of sand,’ you can just say ‘sand,’ the default way sand comes is in grains” but once I got more engaged in the action-adventure stuff that voice moved more to the back of my head. The book is nearly 400 pages long and took me about half a day to read, so it’s fair to say the extra description didn’t slow me down too much.
Apart from our feisty but easily seduced heroine, the only other female character in the book who shows up for more than three pages is her Greek handmaiden, who appears to exist mostly to be more normal than Shahrzad but they’re still friends so we can show that this author doesn’t hate women, despite the otherwise all-male cast. We are not going to resolve the age-old question of “Is feminism when you chase boys” in this book review, so I will only say that this book was a bit too heterosexual for me personally, which is why I don’t read as much straight people romantasy stuff as I used to.
Overall this book isn’t bad for the type of book it is, but it doesn’t exactly transcend the genre, and this is no longer quite my genre the way it used to be. It is unlikely I will read the sequel unless it basically falls into my lap, but I wouldn’t particularly object to reading it if it does.