Throne of the Crescent Moon

My full review can be found at SFF Book Review.

The short version is:
I liked the book, although it didn't live up to its hype for me. I loved the characters and would have liked more focus on the “original” three - Adoulla, Raseed, an Zamia. It really bothered me that mid-book, two more view point characters were introduced. They slowed down the plot and took away “screen time” from Zamia whose character development suffered in turn.

Qualms aside, this was a fun adventure with a cool setting that I recommend for a quick read in between chunky epic fantasies.

7/10

What a fun book. This is the first fantasy-ish book I've enjoyed since the God's War series by Kameron Hurley, which it reminded me of, a bit. Just enough world-building to not get in the way of the quick-ride plot. The characters, while somewhat familiar types, interact in ways that are fun and allow for a bit of development.

I particularly like that much is left to the reader to know how this world came about, what its larger components are–there is religious magic, “ghuls” and shapeshifting going on here, and none of it needs to be explained; it's all there for the fun of the novel.

Wow I did not enjoy this, and now that I've logged into Goodreads to review it and can see it won a bajillion awards, I am confused.

It's the writing style that bugs me most of all; it's all clunky. Exposition, character development, worldbuilding, fight scenes, dialogue.

Points for not being a white psuedo-medieval psuedo-Europe setting, which is why I picked up the book in the first place, but I only finished it because I'd paid full price for it.

Pros: superb world-building, interesting mix of characters

Cons: characters full names always used, slower middle, defeat the main enemy with surprising ease

Doctor Adoulla Makhslood is an old man, and one of the last true ghul hunters. When his former lover's niece is killed in a ghul attack, he hunts it, and its creator, down. Accompanying him is his apprentice, a skilled and devout Dervish. But what they find isn't an easily defeated evil man who's learned to raise a few ghuls, but monsters the likes of which the doctor has only read about in ancient storybooks.

On their quest, they meet Zamia Badawi, whose desert living band has recently met with the monsters the doctor hunts and who possesses ancient magics herself.

Meanwhile, the ‘Falcon Prince', an outlaw who steals from the rich and helps the poor, is inciting rebellion against the Khalif of the Crescent Moon Kingdoms.

I really enjoyed the varied characters in the book. The Doctor is irreverent but knowledgeable in the ways of the world. By the middle of the book he's requested help from an older couple, two of his travelling companions from times past. The contrast between the experienced old people and the two teens (the apprentice and Zamia), makes for some fun scenes. The elders quickly become exacerbated by the simple beliefs of the teens, while the teens help infuse the adults with determination and belief in their eventual victory.

In addition to having older protagonists, the book also brings in characters with different backgrounds. Zamia is a tribeswoman, derided by the doctor for her people's ‘barbaric' beliefs. And his friends are both from different nations. Each character had good and bad traits, as well as personal struggles to overcome in the book. They all felt like real people, with real challenges, trying to figure out what to do next when there's no right - or easy - answers.

While most of the novel took place in and around the city of Dhamsawaat, having characters from other nations helped make the larger world come alive. The city itself felt like a character at times, sprawling across the pages in all its glory. The scents, sounds and feelings of grandeur, squalor and packed humanity are vividly told, though not overbearingly so.

The beginning and ending of the book are filled with monsters, spell work and sword fighting, which makes the middle - with its numerous conversations - seem a bit dull by comparison. Important stuff happens, gathering information, resting, intrigue and gossip, but there was a stretch where it seemed talking was all that was happening.

Each character had a fairly long name and for some reason their full name was always used. I ended up abbreviating the names in my head so I could move on with the story.

Given the character's difficulties when facing one of the big bad guys, I was surprised by how quickly they dealt with all their enemies at the end of the book. While it was a satisfying ending, it seemed a bit quick for all the lead-up. Having said that, I did appreciate that each character was changed by the events of the ending. It was nice seeing that the violence and difficult choices had consequences for them.

This tale is self-contained, though it is the first of a series. Despite my minor complaints, it was a fantastic book that really pulled me into the story. I wish I'd been able to read it in a less disjointed way than I did, giving it the attention it deserved. As many other reviewers have said, Saladin Ahmed is a name to watch for.

This was a fantastic read. You'll come to this book, most likely, for the novelty of a non-Eurocentric fantasy story, one that draws instead from the tradition of The Arabian Nights and western Asian/Persian cultural heritage.

You'll stay for the wildly engaging characters, especially the grizzled, cynical old ghul hunter Adoulla Makhslood, and for the beautifully-written prose.

Throne has all the makings of a modern fantasy classic, one that manages to be refreshingly upbeat while still carrying a serious story, and blends strong character development and a well-built fantasy world with lots of exciting sword and sorcery action.

I feel like the fantasy genre has stagnated lately, with the truly good books coming only from a select few writers. A friend of mine recommended this book, and I nearly passed it up, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that this isn't your typical fantasy book. The setting is unique, the characters personable and memorable, and, while it is a Sword and Sorcery book, the plot isn't predictable. All in all, a very good read. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a new fantasy author to follow.

My appreciation of this story grew in the reading. At the beginning I marveled at the lovely marriage of a typical fantasy magic story with an underpinning that was not medieval Europe and savored it like a good cardamom tea. But it grew so far beyond just that underpinning. This book is not a gimmick. It's a well-told tale that inverts the journey! You are led to believe a band in the making will set out on the road from Dhamsawat to find a hidden mystery only to have theta,e turned inside out. It's a brilliant master stroke that keeps the reader guessing. Along the way you realize you are also reading a zombie story and some of the classic tropes are woven seamlessly into this other world of dust, Khalid's, caftans and ghuls. It's a delicious blend.

I picked this book up a while back and put it down pretty quickly because I just couldn't get past the constant and verbose references to God and God's will. That's not to say I was offended or upset in any way, I just found it really distracting. I'm not a religious person, so that may be part of it, and though English has its own set of curses and invocations – “oh my God,” “God willing,” etc, these were long sentences, sometimes paragraphs, with very little to do with the actual conversation. I wondered if they were translations of common Muslim utterances? This is of course a fictional world, but it appears to be built around something like Islam the same way much Anglo/Western fantasy is built around Arthurian and therefore Christian myth.Anyway. I picked it up on Audible more recently, and that made it easier for me to elide these distracting tangents. It became more of a seasoning to the book rather than a heavy-handed and constant thing. At that point, I shot through the rest of the book.It's fun to read fantasy that's not based on the same Anglo tropes – already this year, I read [b: An Ember in the Ashes 20560137 An Ember in the Ashes (An Ember in the Ashes, #1) Sabaa Tahir https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1417957944s/20560137.jpg 39113604] (Roman/Middle Eastern), [b: Shadow and Bone 10194157 Shadow and Bone (The Grisha, #1) Leigh Bardugo https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1339533695s/10194157.jpg 15093325] (Slavic), and [b: Uprooted 22544764 Uprooted Naomi Novik https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1420795060s/22544764.jpg 41876730] (a different vein of Slavic), and this was a great addition.In animation, they teach you to create unique and identifiable silhouettes for every character, and I felt like this book had the literary version of that: each character was unique, built on archetypes but a bit deeper, and each contributed something unique to the adventure and to the story. In my head, they also had literally unique silhouettes – the large, bearded ghul hunter, the stiff and skilled swordsman, the small feral (literally and figuratively) girl, etc.I found myself wondering how it would all wrap up, which you don't always do in genre books like this, and at the same time I definitely enjoyed the ride – the spells, the settings, the characters. I'll definitely end up picking up the next one.

For a while now, I've wondered at the absence of Middle-Eastern and Renaissance settings in fantasy. I've read a lot of Medieval analogues, A Song of Ice and Fire being the most popular and most famous right around now. Now, while there is nothing wrong with using the medieval period as a basis for a fantasy world, it has long seemed, to me at least, that that was the only setting being used by writers.

My fascination for the Renaissance and Medieval Middle East is rather difficult to explain, but all I can say is that these periods of history (with the latter influencing the former to a great degree) are especially vibrant and lively, particularly in terms of intellectual and artistic pursuits. While I am well aware of the violence that occurred during these periods (no period in history is absent of violence), it is also true that Italy during the Renaissance and the Middle East during the Medieval period were hotbeds for creativity and innovation. One only needs to look at the advances made in science and mathematics by the Middle Eastern scholars, and the artistic accomplishments of the Italian Renaissance masters, to see that there was something going on during those points in history to create something like Baghdad in the thirteenth century, for instance, or Florence in the fifteenth.

It doesn't take much for a writer to see the potential in these periods of history as the basis for a fantasy world, but up until recently only a very few have done so. The last book I liked that was set in a world similar to the Medieval Middle East was The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay, and then recently I discovered, and fell in love with, Scott Lynch's Gentlemen Bastards series, the first novel of which is set in a city very similar to sixteenth-century Venice. The popularity of The Borgias television series also pretty much guarantees that I will be reading about Italian Renaissance-analogues in the near future. But not since The Lions of Al-Rassan have I read anything based on the Medieval Middle East.

Why this has been the case can be the basis for a lengthy debate, but the primary reason that comes to mind mostly has to do with 9/11 and the general atmosphere of the world in the aftermath of that event. Writing about the Middle East, even to use it as a fantasy setting, seemed dangerous, disrespectful even. This has changed, of course, and it appears that now, more than ever, there are more writers who are using the Middle East as the basis for their fantasy worlds, going hand-in-hand with the rise of e-books and small publishing houses that are more willing to take risks with material that other, larger publishing houses might consider too controversial.

And truly, I'm glad for this shift in the current climate of publishing, because otherwise I might not have gotten the chance to discover and read Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed.

Throne of the Crescent Moon is the first book in the Crescent Moon Kingdoms series, taking place in a city called Dhamsawaat. Adoulla Makhslood, the last remaining ghul hunter in the city, is considering the pros and cons of retirement, despite being the last of his order. He's had a long, stressful life, and he's thinking that maybe it's time for him to finally stop, despite the fact that he hasn't trained an apprentice to follow in his footsteps and take over where he has left off. When an old flame asks for his help in a case regarding her niece, Adoulla has no choice but to go on another adventure - except this adventure turns out to be far more dangerous than any he's ever had.

One of the first things I noticed as I made my way through the book was that it felt like an interesting mashup of The Arabian Nights and the television series Supernatural. The comparison to Supernatural isn't meant to be derogatory; I really like the show, and was rather addicted to it when it first came out. I suppose it's the demon-hunting aspect of the story, but I can't help but draw that parallel, especially when it comes to Adoulla and his friends Dawoud and Litaz. As a matter of fact, Adoulla is what I think Dean Winchester would be like if Dean lives to be Adoulla's age: cantankerous and wanting to stop living the demon-hunting life, but having no other choice.

And now that I mention Dawoud and Litaz, I really like the dynamic between them. In one of her point-of-view chunks, Litaz describes Dawoud as being her opposite in everything, and yet she thanks God that they work very well together despite - or probably because of - those differences. There wasn't a lot of character development for them, unfortunately, but I'm chalking this up to the fact that this is only the first book in a series, and I'm hoping for more extensive characterization in the next book or books.

Another couple I'd like to see more of are Raseed and Zamia. Their circumstances are most intriguing, Raseed especially. Introduced early in the book as Adoulla's assistant, his training as a dervish makes for some rather hilarious - and frustrating - moments in the first one-third of the book, especially when it comes to girls. He is, I think, the character with the greatest potential for complex development, especially because his black-and-white view of the world is assaulted and finally broken at the end of the book. Zamia, also, has a rather narrow view of the world, but that view is broken, albeit more gradually than Raseed's, and she's more accepting of these significant shifts in her worldview than Raseed. There is great potential for these two characters to become more interesting and complex, and I'm looking forward to the next book to see how this happens.

And then there is the world, which is what drew me to this book in the first place. I've long been in love with the fairytale Middle East painted by the Arabian Nights, and that spirit, that sense of place, is what I've kept an eye out for in Throne of the Crescent Moon. I'm quite happy to say that I found it. Although practically all the important events of the story take place in the less upscale parts of Dhamsawaat, there are glimpses of what the city is: beautiful and violent, peaceful and noisy, all at the same time. In the glimpses the reader gets through the characters' narration, there is a sense of a city that breathes and lives, like any great city, to the rhythm of its inhabitants, who shape the city even as they themselves are shaped by it.

Another aspect I found intriguing is the way the characters constantly quote from a book called the Heavenly Chapters. I'm not entirely familiar with the Koran, so I can't say for certain if the quotes the characters constantly make are actually from the Koran, or are simply made up by the author for the sake of having a Koran-equivalent in the novel. This, however, doesn't detract in the least from the story, and it's quite interesting how Raseed and Adoulla throw quotes at each other early on in the novel: a great reminder that how one person interprets a book is always going to be different from another person's interpretation of the same text - especially if the text in question is supposed to be sacred. I also like how certain aspects of the Heavenly Chapters play into the demon-slaying magic that Adoulla applies in his line of work. The other kinds of magic in the novel - shape-shifting, necromancy, mage-magic, and alkhemy - are not entirely explored, but there is enough there for the reader to get tantalizing glimpses of how they could conceivably operate.

And this is where I get to the primary flaw of this novel: the scope. There is something rather “small” about this story, though there is definitely the potential for something greater. I was looking for something a little grander in scope, a little more epic. I was rather hoping for something that extends far beyond the scope of the plot that was laid out in Throne of the Crescent Moon, for although the threat to Dhamsawaat was quite great, and the aftereffects of those events will likely have rather large repercussions further down the line, I did feel as if the story could just have been larger (for lack of a better word) than what was portrayed in the story. I rather think this is because Ahmed, who is a veteran of the short story form, is just trying out his hand with the longer novel form in Throne of the Crescent Moon, because I got the feeling that the entirety of the novel could have been told a bit more tightly in novella, as opposed to full-blown novel, length. But this is a small flaw, and something which I hope will see improvement in the upcoming books.

All told, Throne of the Crescent Moon is a promising novel on its own, and a promising opening to what looks to be an interesting series. If the scope seems a little narrow, I attribute that issue to the fact that this is Ahmed's first novel. It's a minor flaw, anyway, and will likely be corrected in the upcoming second book. Either way, this is a great novel for someone looking for something a little different in their fantasy, and willing to overlook a few minor flaws in favor of exploring a a very intriguing new world with a bunch of interesting characters with great potential in the future.