altlovesbooks
"It amazes me to this day how much a little travel changes one's perspective."
What a delightful book. This one has been rotting on my to-read list forever, and I picked it as part of my shortlist of books to get through this year. Not sure why I took so long to get to it, because I really enjoyed this trip.
Asim (our POV character) and Dabir are friends and servants to the Vizir, one the captain of the guard and the other a scholar. An encounter with a fortune teller and an ambiguous destiny ahead of them, the two are charged by the Vizir with retrieving a stolen item that Dabir suspects may be dangerous. The journey takes them far afield, across water, into mysterious places that have been, and into alternate realities where things aren't as they seem. Asim and Dabir fight with everything they have to keep Baghdad from undergoing the same fate as Ubar, but even that might not be enough.
Right off the bat, this is very much sword and sorcery desert fantasy set in 8th century Baghdad, so if that's not your jam, you might not enjoy this. There's djinns, shapeshifting snakes, some musings on faith, and a whole lot of neat swordplay if you decide to give this a go, though. I really enjoyed the two wildly different temperaments of these two friends, with Asim being the typical action-before-thought guard and Dabir being a scholarly thought-before-action sort. Someone in another review I read of this described this book as a buddy cop movie, and I absolutely agree.
Just a really enjoyable book in a setting I don't read too often. I'm absolutely picking up the next books.
"It amazes me to this day how much a little travel changes one's perspective."
What a delightful book. This one has been rotting on my to-read list forever, and I picked it as part of my shortlist of books to get through this year. Not sure why I took so long to get to it, because I really enjoyed this trip.
Asim (our POV character) and Dabir are friends and servants to the Vizir, one the captain of the guard and the other a scholar. An encounter with a fortune teller and an ambiguous destiny ahead of them, the two are charged by the Vizir with retrieving a stolen item that Dabir suspects may be dangerous. The journey takes them far afield, across water, into mysterious places that have been, and into alternate realities where things aren't as they seem. Asim and Dabir fight with everything they have to keep Baghdad from undergoing the same fate as Ubar, but even that might not be enough.
Right off the bat, this is very much sword and sorcery desert fantasy set in 8th century Baghdad, so if that's not your jam, you might not enjoy this. There's djinns, shapeshifting snakes, some musings on faith, and a whole lot of neat swordplay if you decide to give this a go, though. I really enjoyed the two wildly different temperaments of these two friends, with Asim being the typical action-before-thought guard and Dabir being a scholarly thought-before-action sort. Someone in another review I read of this described this book as a buddy cop movie, and I absolutely agree.
Just a really enjoyable book in a setting I don't read too often. I'm absolutely picking up the next books.
