altlovesbooks reviewed Every Rising Sun by Jamila Ahmed
O Malik, they say -- and Allah knows better --
4 stars
Content warning Major plot spoilers
”With a sharp pen and fine paper, I have wrought blood and madness.”
This was delightful. Maybe skewing a touch YA in its insistence on creating a love triangle, but I still really enjoyed this book all the same. And if you know me at all, overlooking YA romance tropes and still rating the book highly is something very rare indeed.
Rather than this being a retelling of the One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, it takes the main storyteller from there (Scheherazade) and puts her on her own adventure reluctantly at the right hand of a Seljuk monarch, Shahyar, whom she marries as a way to force his hand. She finds herself weaving tales at the whim of her husband, trying to keep one step ahead of a potential headsman’s block while keeping her own family safe.
This really was a beautiful story told both through the actions of the characters as well as through the short stories told by Scheherazade along the way. The prose was fantastic, and I liked the way the characters change and develop as the story goes along. There’s some real soul searching done by both Scheherazade and Shahyar over the course of the story, and I liked how things wrapped up for both of them.
My only complaint, and the thing keeping it from a 5 star favorite rating, is the YA love triangle the author forces in. Major plot spoilers: About halfway through a character is introduced whom Scheherazade starts having feelings for, which seems rather hypocritical for someone who was instrumental in getting Shahyar’s previous wife killed for the same reason. Sheherazade acknowledges this throughout the book, but only in an offhand “gee I shouldn’t be doing this” as she’s doing this sort of way that I found a little juvenile.
But I really did enjoy this story greatly. It took me a while to get through, but only because I was taking my time with it, a mark of a story and a world I really did want to get all I could out of. Highly recommend for anyone who liked A Thousand and One Arabian Nights, or who wants to see Sheherazade get out of her castle and go on an adventure of her own.