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.
Added to listAudiobooks Readwith 170 books.
Added to listSci Fiwith 77 books.
I didn't like this one as much as the other two, but appreciate the conclusion/closure.
Part of this had to do with the drastic-feeling change in tone from the first two books. While the first two sat comfortably in sci-fi, almost cyberpunkian mystery with our unnamed synesthete protagonist, this one felt more....I don't even know. Techno-thriller? There's not a lot of mystery here beyond trying to figure out motives, and this book manages to blast past sci-fi and wrap all the way around to fantasy with literal dragons, krakens, and mythical creatures from various cultures showing up (albeit created by technology). It's very fast-paced, and our POV character doesn't seem to do a great job at keeping us in the loop as to what's going on.
Which leads me to the other reason I didn't like this one, the POV character. This book changes POV characters entirely, so we're now sitting in the daughter, Ascalon's, head. She's perfectly acceptable as a POV, but for her to be the exclusive POV in this book made me a bit disappointed. It's drilled into the reader throughout the entire book about how awesome she is at everything (and she even gets more awesome as the book goes on), so the stakes feel especially low in a book where everything should be ramping up. I think I would have appreciated maybe a dual POV including the synesthete, because it felt like Ascalon hit the end of the book along with us and had no more idea what was going on than we did.
I did really like the fleshing out of the Leachateans, their ad-speak and way of life. Their city names, also, were pretty great.
I'm glad to have finished the series though! This was really unique, and despite my hangups in this book, it still kept me reading and interested, so that's something.
I didn't like this one as much as the other two, but appreciate the conclusion/closure.
Part of this had to do with the drastic-feeling change in tone from the first two books. While the first two sat comfortably in sci-fi, almost cyberpunkian mystery with our unnamed synesthete protagonist, this one felt more....I don't even know. Techno-thriller? There's not a lot of mystery here beyond trying to figure out motives, and this book manages to blast past sci-fi and wrap all the way around to fantasy with literal dragons, krakens, and mythical creatures from various cultures showing up (albeit created by technology). It's very fast-paced, and our POV character doesn't seem to do a great job at keeping us in the loop as to what's going on.
Which leads me to the other reason I didn't like this one, the POV character. This book changes POV characters entirely, so we're now sitting in the daughter, Ascalon's, head. She's perfectly acceptable as a POV, but for her to be the exclusive POV in this book made me a bit disappointed. It's drilled into the reader throughout the entire book about how awesome she is at everything (and she even gets more awesome as the book goes on), so the stakes feel especially low in a book where everything should be ramping up. I think I would have appreciated maybe a dual POV including the synesthete, because it felt like Ascalon hit the end of the book along with us and had no more idea what was going on than we did.
I did really like the fleshing out of the Leachateans, their ad-speak and way of life. Their city names, also, were pretty great.
I'm glad to have finished the series though! This was really unique, and despite my hangups in this book, it still kept me reading and interested, so that's something.