Throne of the Crescent Moon

I picked this book up a while back and put it down pretty quickly because I just couldn't get past the constant and verbose references to God and God's will. That's not to say I was offended or upset in any way, I just found it really distracting. I'm not a religious person, so that may be part of it, and though English has its own set of curses and invocations – “oh my God,” “God willing,” etc, these were long sentences, sometimes paragraphs, with very little to do with the actual conversation. I wondered if they were translations of common Muslim utterances? This is of course a fictional world, but it appears to be built around something like Islam the same way much Anglo/Western fantasy is built around Arthurian and therefore Christian myth.Anyway. I picked it up on Audible more recently, and that made it easier for me to elide these distracting tangents. It became more of a seasoning to the book rather than a heavy-handed and constant thing. At that point, I shot through the rest of the book.It's fun to read fantasy that's not based on the same Anglo tropes – already this year, I read [b: An Ember in the Ashes 20560137 An Ember in the Ashes (An Ember in the Ashes, #1) Sabaa Tahir https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1417957944s/20560137.jpg 39113604] (Roman/Middle Eastern), [b: Shadow and Bone 10194157 Shadow and Bone (The Grisha, #1) Leigh Bardugo https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1339533695s/10194157.jpg 15093325] (Slavic), and [b: Uprooted 22544764 Uprooted Naomi Novik https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1420795060s/22544764.jpg 41876730] (a different vein of Slavic), and this was a great addition.In animation, they teach you to create unique and identifiable silhouettes for every character, and I felt like this book had the literary version of that: each character was unique, built on archetypes but a bit deeper, and each contributed something unique to the adventure and to the story. In my head, they also had literally unique silhouettes – the large, bearded ghul hunter, the stiff and skilled swordsman, the small feral (literally and figuratively) girl, etc.I found myself wondering how it would all wrap up, which you don't always do in genre books like this, and at the same time I definitely enjoyed the ride – the spells, the settings, the characters. I'll definitely end up picking up the next one.