Publisher: Viking Books for Young Readers
Medium: Print
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟
Blurb: Mortals rule the desert nation of Miraji, but mythical beasts still roam the wild and remote areas, and rumor has it that somewhere, djinn still perform their magic. For humans, it’s an unforgiving place, especially if you’re poor, orphaned, or female.
Amani Al’Hiza is all three. She’s a gifted gunslinger with perfect aim, but she can’t shoot her way out of Dustwalk, the back-country town where she’s destined to wind up wed or dead.
Then she meets Jin, a rakish foreigner, in a shooting contest, and sees him as the perfect escape route. But though she’s spent years dreaming of leaving Dustwalk, she never imagined she’d gallop away on a mythical horse—or that it would take a foreign fugitive to show her the heart of the desert she thought she knew.
Rebel of the Sands reveals what happens when a dream deferred explodes—in the fires of rebellion, of romantic passion, and the all-consuming inferno of a girl finally, at long last, embracing her power.
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First things first, happy book birthday to this book! It came out on March 8, 2016.
Thoughts:
I didn’t hate this book, but I didn’t love it either.
Let’s start at the beginning:
We dive immediately into a bit of action. I like the voice of the narrator, of her acknowledgment of her differences from the people around her—even her gender. At first, it feels a little bit old. We’ve all seen a woman masquerading as a man before: Mulan, other books, TV shows, comedy sketches, etc. What makes this different is the situation that Amani is in. She wants to get out of her Podunk town where the only thing left waiting for her is marriage.
A few pages in and we’ve already met the love interest. Rakish, mysterious, and cocky, Jin is someone that we’ve all seen before. Of course, he disappears only to reappear when she’s in trouble, and he saves the day, leading her out of the town. The book follows along with this: Amani travels with Jin, they get into shenanigans, and she tries to figure out more about his past while he knows essentially her entire life story. It ends with an almost predictable twist that didn’t really leave me wanting more. As with most slightly political fantasy stories, there is a rebellion involved.
One of the best selling points about this book, to me, was the lore. Though sporadic, we see mentions and read stories that are historically significant and beautiful. I love the stories about the djinn, about the beasts that roam the desert, and the consequences of sleeping with a magical creature.
On that note, I was a bit disappointed. I wanted to see the djinn, I wanted to see more magical beasts, and I wanted a love story that I hadn’t seen in other YA books—ones that didn’t resemble the paranormal ones of the early 2010s. Jin and Amani weren’t exactly insta-love, but their love story happened just a little bit too quickly for me.
Besides the cover, the mention of djinn is what caught my attention, but other than mentions, there were no djinn in the story! In the time of fairytale retellings and 1001 Nights retellings, seeing a magical desert action/adventure/romance was well and truly on my radar. I love Middle Eastern lore and I want to see it adapted into more stories. Alwyn Hamilton tried it to do so and did fairly well, but I really felt like the book could have been so much more.
It was a quick read and felt pretty fast-paced to me, so I enjoyed that, and I’ve seen reviews that say the next book is better, but I’m not too sure I want to buy it. If it comes to my local library I just may pick it up.
This book is the first of a trilogy: Rebel of the Sands, Traitor to the Throne, and Hero at the Fall. All books are currently available at Books-A-Million, Barnes & Noble, and other retailers. *Not sponsored.
I will try to get the review The Hate U Give up in the next week!
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