Review: Celestial Bodies

Title: Celestial Bodies

Author: Jokha Alharthi

Genre: Contemporary

Trigger Warnings: Pregnancy, childbirth, death, death of children, child abuse, adult/minor relationship, incest*, toxic relationship, slavery, infidelity, spousal neglect, ableism, animal death (mentions), sexual content (minor)

*Note: I added incest as a trigger because many characters in this story marry their first cousins, and we in the West would categorize that as incest. But it’s clear from the book that not only is that not considered incest in Oman, marrying someone from your family is often preferable to marrying a stranger. I listed incest as a trigger tag because I know most of the readers of this blog are from Western countries, but I’m also trying to be sensitive to differing cultural norms.

Back Cover:

In the village of al-Awafi in Oman, we encounter three sisters: Mayya, who marries after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries from a sense of duty; and Khawla, who chooses to refuse all offers and await a reunion with the man she loves, who has emigrated to Canada. These three women and their families, their losses and loves, unspool beautifully against a backdrop of a rapidly changing Oman, a country evolving from a traditional, slave-owning society into its complex present. Through the sisters, we glimpse a society in all its degrees, from the very poorest of the local slave families to those making money through the advent of new wealth.

The first novel originally written in Arabic to ever win the Man Booker International Prize, and the first book by a female Omani author to be translated into English, Celestial Bodies marks the arrival in the United States of a major international writer.

Review:

I am not entirely sure what I just read. Celestial Bodies is vastly different from my normal reading fare, and I don’t know that I really understood it. It’s densely populated with characters, time jumps back and forth, and the story of this one family gets woven against the backdrop of a changing Oman and the tensions between tradition and modernity.

From the back cover, it seems like the story will focus on the three sisters, Mayya, Asma, and Khawla. And that’s where it starts – with the man Mayya loves never acknowledging her, her marriage to someone else, and the birth of her first child, a daughter she names London. But then it branches off to follow other people at other points in time.

Mayya’s husband Abdullah is the only one to narrate in first person as he reminisces about his childhood with his nursemaid and his abusive father, his marriage with Mayya, and their children, and interacts with his daughter London as an adult. The rest of the story is told omnisciently, with third-person narration seamlessly slipping between Khawla, Asma, the three sisters’ mother and father, Abdullah’s nursemaid, London as an adult, and many other more minor characters (including Asma’s husband, Abdullah’s nursemaid’s mother, and Mayya’s father’s lover) that provide history and context to this family’s saga.

Time is a fluid thing here. The story slips seamlessly between what I’m calling the “present” – the time where Mayya has just given birth to London and Asma and Khawla are getting ready to be married – and the past and the future. It delves into childhoods of parents and grandparents, then slides ahead to decades beyond the “present.” There are no temporal anchors here, and I’m only calling one part of the story as the “present” because that’s where the book opened.

I wanted to categorize this as magical realism, because it has a strong magical realism feel, but there is no magic in this story and nothing supernatural besides traditional superstitions. The audiobook is only 8 hours and per the StoryGraph it’s 250 pages in print, but Celestial Bodies somehow feels like a sweeping family saga anyway. There isn’t a plot, just life, the tangled timelines illustrating the interconnectedness of family and how past influences present influences future.

I am not sure I understand this book. It packs more into its 250 pages than should be possible, and balances such a massive cast of characters that it did get a little confusing at times. But it’s deftly woven and somehow kept my interest despite a complete lack of plot in the usual sense. I absolutely see how it won its awards.

Review: The Kingdom of Copper (DNF)

Title: The Kingdom of Copper

Series: The Daevabad Trilogy #2

Author: S.A. Chakraborty

Genre: Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Forced marriage, sexual content, imprisonment/confinement, medical content, injury, racism in allegory, structural inequality, body horror

Read to: 23%

Spoiler Warning: This book is second in a series, so reading beyond this point will most likely expose you to spoilers of the first Daevabad book, The City of Brass.

Back Cover:

Nahri’s life changed forever the moment she accidentally summoned Dara, a formidable, mysterious djinn, during one of her schemes. Whisked from her home in Cairo, she was thrust into the dazzling royal court of Daevabad and quickly discovered she would need all her grifter instincts to survive there.

Now, with Daevabad entrenched in the dark aftermath of the battle that saw Dara slain at Prince Ali’s hand, Nahri must forge a new path for herself, without the protection of the guardian who stole her heart or the counsel of the prince she considered a friend. But even as she embraces her heritage and the power it holds, she knows she’s been trapped in a gilded cage, watched by a king who rules from the throne that once belonged to her family–and one misstep will doom her tribe.

Meanwhile, Ali has been exiled for daring to defy his father. Hunted by assassins, adrift on the unforgiving copper sands of his ancestral land, he is forced to rely on the frightening abilities the marid, the unpredictable water spirits, have gifted him. But in doing so, he threatens to unearth a terrible secret his family has long kept buried.

And as a new century approaches and the djinn gather within Daevabad’s towering brass walls for celebrations, a threat brews unseen in the desolate north. It’s a force that would bring a storm of fire straight to the city’s gates . . . and one that seeks the aid of a warrior trapped between worlds, torn between a violent duty he can never escape and a peace he fears he will never deserve.

Review:

Reading this book was a really good lesson in one particular writing concept: You have to give your characters at least some small wins or the reader is just going to get frustrated.

One of my two big problems with The City of Brass was that nobody would give Nahri any agency over her own life. She had things she wanted to do, but everybody around her had things they wanted her to do and no matter what she tried she couldn’t seem to do anything that wasn’t in one of the powerful men around her’s idea of what she should do. That came back in this book, but worse. Nahri still had independent desires, but even the smallest expression of them was cracked down on brutally. And Ali didn’t even have much agency in this book–other people’s political machinations ended up forcing him to do what they wanted regardless of what he wanted.

And Dara is a point of view character in this book, and I’m still super mad at him for being one of the characters who wouldn’t let Nahri have any agency in book one, so I only barely tolerated his parts for the little bits of the world they revealed.

I really do like this world. This book starts to expand on the djinn world beyond Daevabad and the history of the djinn, and that part was really interesting. And I actually do like the characters – Nahri is great, and I even like Ali after the first book. The City of Brass was perfectly readable, and I think this one could have even been enjoyable if I wasn’t so completely frustrated.

There was no winning for any of the characters. Despite what they wanted and all the things they tried, every spark of independece and making their own choices was quashed by the people around them. You have to give your characters some wins, even small ones, or the reader is going to rage quit. And even for a great world and secrets that seem likely to be revealed soon, I really have no interest in continuing with the total frustration that is reading this book.

The Daevabad Trilogy:

1. The City of Brass
2. The Kingdom of Copper
3. The Empire of Gold

Review: The City of Brass

Title: The City of Brass

Series: The Daevabad Trilogy #1

Author: S.A. Chakraborty

Genre: Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Blood, death, fire, drowning, rape (mentions), racism in allegory, death of children, body horror

Back Cover:

Nahri has never believed in magic. Certainly, she has power; on the streets of 18th century Cairo, she’s a con woman of unsurpassed talent. But she knows better than anyone that the trade she uses to get by—palm readings, zars, healings—are all tricks, sleights of hand, learned skills; a means to the delightful end of swindling Ottoman nobles.

But when Nahri accidentally summons an equally sly, darkly mysterious djinn warrior to her side during one of her cons, she’s forced to accept that the magical world she thought only existed in childhood stories is real. For the warrior tells her a new tale: across hot, windswept sands teeming with creatures of fire, and rivers where the mythical marid sleep; past ruins of once-magnificent human metropolises, and mountains where the circling hawks are not what they seem, lies Daevabad, the legendary city of brass, a city to which Nahri is irrevocably bound.

In that city, behind gilded brass walls laced with enchantments, behind the six gates of the six djinn tribes, old resentments are simmering. And when Nahri decides to enter this world, she learns that true power is fierce and brutal. That magic cannot shield her from the dangerous web of court politics. That even the cleverest of schemes can have deadly consequences.

After all, there is a reason they say be careful what you wish for…

Review:

I’m struggling with what to say about this book. It was good. It wasn’t as gripping and engrossing as I’d hoped, but it was still perfectly readable. I just had a few issues, which I want to get out of the way first. (Also, fair warning: This is a really long book and this review may get long too.)

One: Dara (the djinn that Nahri accidentally summons) refuses to tell Nahri anything for no discernable reason. At one point Nahri actually has to threaten to let herself get eaten by monsters to convince him to tell her anything. I have no idea what his purpose is in keeping her in the dark about the family she’s supposedly part of and the society he wants her to join, and knowing a lot of these non-secrets would have actually been helpful. The book tries to make a romance between the two of them but it was mostly based on “he’s hot” and it felt forced to me. He seemed irritatingly tropey at the beginning and I only tolerated him because Nahri liked him a lot, but I outright hated him at the end.

Two: There’s a lot of politicking in this book, but the essential conflict is Nahri, a con woman used to deciding her own fate and scheming for her coin, being stripped of any agency over her own life by people who have decided that her family heritage and what they think that means for her take precedence over anything she might want, say, think, or feel. It wasn’t bad from a story point of view, but it was a case where I got so frustrated with Nahri being unable to wrest any agency away from these people that I almost put it down from sheer rage.

Despite how annoyed I got with politicking in Dune, I didn’t mind it that much in this book. Well, I did a bit in the beginning, but as I grew to like the characters more I minded it less. Which is a good thing, because despite some magic, some fights, and one assassin, the majority of the book is politics. The plot consists of a blend of Daevabad politics and Nahri fighting for some agency, so if you can’t tolerate the politics at least a little you won’t like this book. But on the bright side, they’re magic politics about djinn, so slightly less boring than regular politics.

Ali, a djinn prince in Daevabad, is a point-of-view character, and at first he bored me to death. Compared with Nahri and her magic and adventures, the palace niceties and politics in his sections were pretty bland. He also started out as a wide-eyed innocent kid taking his first steps into adult responsibilities, and that was a little grating, but he got wise pretty quick and I liked him and Nahri about equally by about halfway through. I enjoyed their friendship a lot, actually, and I hope it continues in the rest of the series.

I love how steeped this story is in Arabic culture. Unlike the author, I’m not a convert to Islam, but between my research into Islam and my studies of the Arabic language I understood all of the terms mentioned and could even spell most of them, which made me feel pretty proud of myself. Plus (as you might have guessed by the fact that I’ve studied Islam despite not being Muslim and am teaching myself Arabic) Middle Eastern and especially Islamic culture is fascinating to me, and I love worlds set there – even though this story mostly took place in the fictional djinn city of Daevabad as opposed to a real-world setting, it was still unquestionably an Arabic world.

Up until the very end, I was on the fence about whether I’d continue reading the series. It wasn’t a bad read, it just didn’t grip me as much as I would have liked. But I really like the world, I can’t wait until Nahri finally snaps and unleashes hell on these people, and the ending picked up steam and left me with enough unanswered questions to be interested in continuing. If nothing else, my library has the rest of the series on audiobook too, so they’ll at least be reasonably interesting work reading.

The Daevabad Trilogy:

1. The City of Brass
2. The Kingdom of Copper
3. The Empire of Gold

Review: Remote Control

Title: Remote Control

Author: Nnedi Okorafor

Genre: Science Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Death, death of children, death of parent, death of animals, violence against children, periods, being hit by a car, guns (brief)

Back Cover:

“She’s the adopted daughter of the Angel of Death. Beware of her. Mind her. Death guards her like one of its own.”

The day Fatima forgot her name, Death paid a visit. From hereon in she would be known as Sankofa–a name that meant nothing to anyone but her, the only tie to her family and her past.

Her touch is death, and with a glance a town can fall. And she walks–alone, except for her fox companion–searching for the object that came from the sky and gave itself to her when the meteors fell and when she was yet unchanged; searching for answers.

But is there a greater purpose for Sankofa, now that Death is her constant companion?

Review:

The back cover of this book is kind of misleading, but I don’t really blame it because it would be hard to write a description of what happens in this book that doesn’t sound incredibly boring. There is no greater purpose for Sankofa. But this book isn’t about that. It’s not really about a plot at all. It’s about Sankofa, a girl who can kill with a thought and can’t always control it and whom everyone fears because of it.

This story is, overwhelmingly, a tragedy. It is the story of Sankofa, a child, a young child, losing everything and everyone she knew and cared about again and again and again. The first time this happens she is seven, when she loses her family and her town and her name and everything she ever knew in one moment of disaster. With no home, no name, and no one to help her, she begins chasing something that was stolen from her.

All technology dies under her touch, but she doesn’t even need touch to kill a human. Stories of her spread, and people fear her, and many hate what they fear. She is alone except for her fox companion. Every single refuge she finds is eventually destroyed or she is driven away by those who fear her power of death and hate what they fear. And as I read, all I could think was, She is a child. She is a child. She is seven, eight, nine, ten years old. She is too young for your hate and fear. She does not want to kill you. She is a child who has lost everything too many times to count. Have compassion.

But of course, there are children her age and younger in our real world also who face anger and fear and hatred from adults for something they cannot control and did not choose.

This is not a happy book. It isn’t long, but the emotions it contains are large. This is a small story of big feelings, grief and loss and pain and being a child alone in the world and hated for something you are that you did not ask for, did not choose, and can’t stop being. It is beautiful and vivid and intense and engrossing despite the lack of discernable plot and, above all else, heartbreaking.

Review: The Afterlife of Abdul

Title: The Afterlife of Abdul

Series: Azrael #1

Author: Ayse Hafiza

Genre: Supernatural

Trigger Warnings: Death, death of child, mild gore/body horror, car crash, drunk driving

Back Cover:

Abdul kills himself and Jenny… he didn’t mean to.

Their deaths were the result of a car crash. He had been rushing to meet his date. His motorbike collided with her Mum’s red car and Jenny a little six year old girl died. He didn’t know she was there. It was an accident.

Their souls meet in the space between their immediate deaths and the start of their afterlives.

Imagine dying and meeting Azrael, the Angel of Death. What happens in that place? What happens when you are forced to submit to your death?

Review:

You’d be forgiven for thinking a story titled “The Afterlife of Abdul” is about Abdul’s afterlife. You’d be wrong, but you’d be forgiven.

I got this free on Amazon, and I knew it was a short story going into it. I was pretty excited about it, actually, because the author is Muslim and I was interested to hear a Muslim perspective on heaven/the afterlife.

That’s not what’s here, though. Not at all.

It starts out strong. The first chapter is about Abdul – it sets up a conflict between him not being as good a Muslim as he could be but desiring to be better, and the way the girl he’s dating seems to be Muslim in name only and he likes her but is afraid she’s pulling him away from God. This is all set up through internal monologue as he drives his motorcycle through the rain, and gave me a really solid connection to this character. The chapter ends with him colliding with a car (part of the problem was that he was speeding, but part of it was the car had its lights off and he didn’t see it) and dying.

Then the second chapter from Jenny’s perspective and her experience with dying in the car crash and going to heaven. I didn’t really care about Jenny all that much – her chapter is much shorter and focuses on her death only – but I accepted it because the back cover played up her as important and maybe this is important to Abdul’s story. (Bear in mind that at this point, Abdul has been solidly cemented as the main character in my mind.)

Chapter three is from Jenny’s mom’s perspective. I don’t think the author was trying to play her off as unlikeable, but she very much was. She pretty much ticked every box on the “independent and b*tchy” stereotype checklist. She was also driving drunk, which is why her lights were off and Abdul didn’t see her car. So though the back cover tried to play it off as entirely Abdul’s fault Jenny died, I think it’s at least 50% Jenny’s mom’s fault. This character also gets a lot of backstory, which is why I think the author was trying to make her sympathetic and just failed.

Chapter four was super short and from the perspective of Azrael, the angel of death.

And that’s it. There’s four chapters. The focus is on the deaths and the moments after, no actual afterlives involved. And the point-of-view characters get progressively less likeable/enjoyable as the story goes on. Mostly I’m just disappointed that I didn’t get what I was promised – a story about Abdul’s experience in the afterlife. The first chapter was stellar, and if it had continued with Abdul and not a disjointed series of other characters, I’d be chomping at the bit for book two, not delivering a verdict of “very disappointing.”

The Azrael Series:

1. The Afterlife of Abdul
2. King Solomon and the Cat
3. Mr. Time