Amina is a notorious pirate who retired 10 years ago when she became a mother. Needing reward money, she goes out in search of the missing daughter of one of her former shipmates, leaving her own daughter back home in the care of Amina’s mother. As she rebuilds her crew and regains control of her ship, she investigates the whereabouts of the missing girl. Thus begins The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi and the story of the challenges she and her shipmates encounter during the pursuit.
This was a fun story with a large, diverse cast of lovable (and hateable) characters and hard reality combined with fantastical beasts, curses, and luck. It was mostly action-packed but got long-winded at times. Their adventures through the Indian Sea were many. The trials were diverse and exciting. And, personally, it was a good time for me to read a book about pirates! Otherwise, for such a long book, I don’t have much else to say about it without giving things away. If you like adventures with fantasy creatures, magical objects, and a strong female lead character, you’ll like it!
I had read the first two novels in S.A. Chakraborty’s Daevabad Trilogy but couldn’t get through the third book since too much time had passed between the second and third novels and I couldn’t get into it. So I was curious to give Chakraborty another try when I heard this novel was good. I’m glad I read it! I know there is already one sequel and I’m sure there will be others. However, I didn’t love this one enough to continue with the series.
The narrators, Lameece Issaq (who read most of the novel) and Amin El Gamal (who read excerpts from various other stories throughout throughout the novel as a character called Jamal), did a great job. Issaq had a large vocal repertoire and was an entertaining voice actor! Unfortunately, her volume had a tendency to get really loud and really soft at times which required volume adjustments. This is not something I normally encounter in audiobooks, thankfully. El Gamal didn’t get to show off much with his limited contributions, but he did a fine job. I’ll give them an A- as an ensemble. The audiobook production had a unique feature in a few parts where the main storytelling by Amina was interrupted when she spoke to Jamal “offline”. The producers made it sound like she had shoved the mic to the side and was speaking to someone else outside her recording room. I liked that creative choice. Although it did always take me out of the story, it was the author’s intention. So I didn’t get as irritated as I otherwise do when taken out of a story.
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