The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi

I must preface this with the fact that I am a notoriously slow reader with poor "stamina" and this felt like three books instead of one to me. Turning over the final page, I felt more exhausted than satisfied. But the fact that I'm still rating it as I am should signal how well the strengths of this book still manage to outweigh my (entirely subjective) misgivings.

Cover art notwithstanding, I somehow convinced myself that this was gonna be more historical fiction with some magical realism elements floating in the background. And for the first half of the book that certainly was the case; going into this I was loosely aware of the long history of the Indian Ocean and all the cultures on it that interacted with each other. Long before Vasco da Gama showed up on the scene and changed everything, there was this whole other cultural sphere going on during the Islamic Golden Age that often gets neglected in favor of imagery of desert palaces and caravans of camels linking cities from Persia to Al Andalus. And I'm glad that I finally came across some fictional media that dove into this neglected historical period.

The "gang of past-their-prime adventurers coming out of retirement for one last job" is something I've seen done before, but to date this is the best iteration of it that I've come across. I really enjoyed the side cast of supporting pirates, but I wish they had had more time in the spotlight before the second half of the story turned to hard fantasy and the magical threats quickly became too dangerous for them to be relevant. For a story that seemed to initially be leaning hard into a theme of relying on the power of friendship, our protagonist sure ended up doing a lot on her own.

I had issues with the pacing and tone shift in the latter part of the book where we went from swashbuckling hijinks to high stakes sword and sorcery, and there was a strange bait-and-switch with a side villain who was initially painted as a great and terrible evil but ended up being completely overshadowed by the actual antagonist. But overall the strong opening just about counterbalanced the unexpected ending for me.

Now this was the sort of pirate queen adventure I was expecting when I had read Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea. (That book is historical pirate politics and internal musings about power and this book is more fantasy adventure; I liked them both, they're just different.)

Amina al-Sarafi is a middle-aged pirate queen who gets blackmailed out of retirement into "one last job", gets the criminal gang back together, and ultimately faces off against a sorcerer and his sea monster (as if the cover doesn't give you this hint). (Also, gender stuff! You love to see it.)

It's set in the same world as her Daevabad trilogy although you don't need to have read those books at all. (You might appreciate a single character briefly appearing as well as the lawyer parrots, but that's about the extent of it.) My opinion here is that this is a fantasy pirate heist book and so is a bit more accessible than a fantasy djinn politics book (even if here it means that the world feels more like a stage and the side characters get a little bit less air time).

All in all great fun, highly recommend especially if you liked SA Chakraborty's previous work.