My Rating: 3
Goodreads summary: https://bit.ly/2RRB1hj
My Thoughts
Unfortunately, the book did not emotionally wreck me or grip me like I wanted. This is my first big fantasy book, excluding Carry On and Wayward Son, I’ve read in a while so I don’t know if it affected my reading experience or anything.
I was really close to DNF’ing this book when I was three quarters of the way through it, but I really wanted to give this book a chance so I pushed through. I ended up skimming the remainder of the fifty/forty pages in the middle I had left and honestly skipped to the second half of the book which went by much faster and then went back to read what I had skipped. I had invested too much time into this book (emotionally and literally) to just completely DNF it.
It’s a weird way of reading but personally, I couldn’t help it. The middle was way too slow and long. The beginning was okay and the ending was good but the middle was just bland. Nothing much happened for way too many pages and it really dragged out. The slow pace of the middle didn’t bother me as much as the fact that at times, it just felt repetitive. They’d walk, fight, they’d walk some more, and fight again. I know the whole point of the book was that it was a gang of characters going on a quest, but I wish something more happened when they were going on a quest. I felt like it was missing something in the middle to keep me hooked.
I also wasn’t a huge fan of the romance. I feel like it was rushed and didn’t really understand how it developed between the two main love interests. I also didn’t really care for all the characters in the group as I usually do in the other fantasy books that involve a gang of characters which made me so sad. Usually, I become a die hard fan and an honorary member (in my head and heart haha) of their little group. In this book, I just couldn’t feel that much chemistry between all the characters.
Hafash Faizal definitely knows how to world build. I loved her descriptions of the different regions of her world. Her writing really came through in the description of the settings, so much that I could feel hot sand sliding in between my toes. I really liked Nasir as a character. His story to undeniably please his father bothered me in the beginning, but over time, I came to want to learn more about him as flawed as he is.
I also loved reading the parts with Altair. He’s the funny, witty character added in the story to balance out the darkness, which is exactly what he did. I liked how Faizal added this layer of mystery around his always lighthearted character that makes you question everything you know about Altair and whether his motives are as pure as his incessant witty humor.
It’s because of the ending that I’m going to probably continue with the series. This series is supposed to be a duology so given that I won’t have too much to catch up on, I think I’m going to wait a while before picking up the second book. I have some mixed feelings about the ending but don’t want to go too much into detail due to spoilers but I may write a post where I talk more about it later on in a future post. I did appreciate the cliffhanger though because I feel like it’s foreshadowing to the second book being action packed, a bit more fast paced, and with a plot that’s going to be much more gripping from start to finish
Last but not least, another thing I love about this book is the fact that it exists. I wasn’t a huge fan of it personally but I know that Hafsah Faizal’s voice is a voice that matters and I’m glad that more POC authors are able to express themselves and have their works promoted in mainstream publishing/marketing so that people can pick up a copy and try it for themselves.