The Daughters of Izdihar

An Egyptian-inspired fantasy world following women trapped in a patriarchal society on the brink of war.

A small number of people can weave elements (a la ATLA), a practice until recently banned after a woman able to weave all the elements basically nuked a peninsular into the sea during the last war. Now they are training again as diplomatic tensions fray. At the same time, Parliament is debating a new constitution and a suffragette movement seeks to secure the vote and end guardianship men have over their wives or female relatives.

Amidst all this, Nehal is being married off to a rich family to pay her father’s gambling debts, but her future husband is more interested in Georgina, a working-class girl writing for the suffragettes of whom her father does not approve. Nehal is more interested in attending the new weaving academy and joining the military.

It does a good job at weaving (if you forgive the pun) the many facets of oppression women and queer people face in societies such as Egypt. Also the links between hate groups and police and the way they're funded. It does feel a little one-note sometimes (the fantasy elements seem very incidental) and it being a duology means there isn’t much of a satisfying conclusion until the second book is out next year. But the characters and circumstances are engaging and I’m certainly interested in following up with part 2. 

(this is going to be a long review that's not... very nice and contains mild spoilers as well (I don't really think they're spoilers though) so yeah here's your warning i guess)

First of all i have to say that my biggest problem with this book was its premise. So why have i read it? I saw someone on twitter post a picture of their recent book purchases and i spotted this book among them, the author's name stood out as very Egyptian and i got really excited and immediately looked it up. When i read the synopsis i was so disappointed but i thought i should give it a chance anyway. I really shouldn't have bothered.

This book is just another attempt at recycling the extremely tiresome narrative of Arab/Egyptian women being helpless and oppressed by the evil, regressive Arab/Egyptian men. Yes, I know it's a fantasy book, but it's inspired by Egyptian culture/history. And of course, surprising absolutely no one, the only man who supports women's fight to liberate themselves has to be a blond “Talyani” (Egyptian Arabic for Italian, the author didn't even bother with coming up with new countries lol. A wholly new world, i heard.) with blue eyes and everything. The man who rescued our heroine from her backwards family and lets her pursue the studies she has always wanted. Wow heart fucking eyes. You can't convince me that this book, aimed mainly at a western audience, doesn't reinforce harmful stereotypes with these frankly bizarre choices in 2023.

Anyway, i also thought that maybe the feminist stuff in this book would be good to read about. What's not to love about women with superpowers trying to dismantle the patriarchy? Oh, a whole fucking lot. The sexism/misogyny in this book was, again, recycled arguments that you've heard millions of times before, that have been done in thousands of books before and sometimes they were caricature-ishly funny from how forced and convoluted they were because the author had a checklist of misogynistic things to put in the book just to make a point. The retorts at said misogynist arguments were also recycled. That shit was just fucking boring to read and it was also like 70% of the whole book. The other 30% was just the astonishingly uninteresting characters doing the most stupid bullshit.

I also heard this was a queer story which was another reason i put my suspicions about a book with such a premise aside and picked it up anyway. sigh there is a gay side character in here that gets introduced at the beginning of the book to Nehal, one of the protagonists, from nowhere for no reason but i was like “ok, whatever” and she immediately befriends him, then he just disappears for the rest of the book (she also gets told by her in-laws that he's “a queer”, and she should stay away from him because of her reputation bla bla bla. What a homophobic people!!) and appears again only a few pages before the book ends so that Nehal can tell him “hey i think I'm gay too” and he goes “damn, sucks for us doesn't it”, then disappears again. Like???? He just felt like a plot device to me. (Other characters felt the same btw, they appeared to be important characters at first who clearly should have some influence on whatever tf was going on but then they just abruptly disappear from the story and we move on lol) Nehal's relationship with the female love interest wasn't dealt with in much better ways, it felt rushed and most of the supposed development of their feelings for each other happened behind the scenes and we just got told about it.

Oh, i forgot the fantasy aspect of this book...which wasn't really there? The author barely changed the names of a few Egyptian places, came up with an extremely boring religion (that didn't get exolored at all and the reader barely knows shit about it), then decided to choose the most boring, overdone magic system and rolled with it. There was a ton of references to Egyptian culture (clothes and food) and that was supposed to be enough world building? I thought this book was, uh, “set in a wholly new world”. (The exotic orient?? Lol)

That magic system too, again,as recycled as it is, didn't get explored enough, if at all. Surely people with superpowers to control elements would fight more against the oppression they supposedly endure. What about the bad people who could weave? What did they do with their abilities? Like there have to be consequences for something like that especially with how much only two/three of the bunch of characters we encounter do so much with their weaving but no, the story could as well be set in real Egypt in like the 1800s and not much would be different. What about male weavers? Yes, they were allowed to to go to school to master their weaving but there was still a lot of prejudice against weaving, what did they do about said prejudice?


I don't want to be mean to a young Egyptian author and especially since this is her debut novel but this book pissed me the hell off. And lastly, if someone saw this review and got mad at me for it: i simply don't care. I'm obviously entitled to my opinion.