Amy 
young adult, fantasy, action/suspense
In The Wrath and the Dawn by Renee Ahdieh, Khalid, the young king, takes a new bride every night and murders her every morning. Shahrzad decides to volunteer as his next bride in order to murder the king as revenge for her best friend's death.
Amy's Review
(audiobook)
Right from the start I was annoyed that the premise of this story was not solid. Shazi simply placed herself in a dangerous situation without a reasonable plan to carry out her goal. She was fortunate to use her guile, intelligence, and superiority to get out of the situation but her initial choice was so idiotic as to be unbelievable. To me, that unrealistic start really flawed the entire story. Also, how did Shazi conveniently get some poison in her pocket when she and the Caliph went to the market? That was never explained and is another poisoned arrow in my enjoyment of this story. HOWEVER, when I was able to not think about the ridiculous premise of this story, and just accept the baseline as a given, I did really enjoy it.
Despite its flaws, the novel had an intriguing setting, terrific characters, and great writing. Therefore, despite myself, I really enjoyed it! The official description states that this novel is based on 1001 Nights of which I have little familiarity. After reading about it, I do see that this novel was, indeed, strongly based on 1001 Nights. However, while reading this novel, I kept thinking it was like a retelling of The Beauty and the Beast.
I mostly listened to the audiobook but did some actual book reading at times too. I give the narrator a B. Not great. Not terrible. She had her moments but often spoke in a slow, robotic monotone and did not have a great range of character voices.
I’ll be reading the sequel to discover the ending to Shazi’s story and am very happy that there is only one sequel.
No comments:
Post a Comment