Format: Print 

The Adventures of Amina al-Sarafi was my most anticipated release of 2023 and yet it took me until December 2024 to actually pick it up because I was so worried I wouldn’t enjoy it as much as the Daevabad trilogy. I needn’t have been concerned and Shannon Chakraborty has firmly established herself as one of my favourite authors. 

I think the way the story is narrated is really clever. Amina is telling her story to a scribe, and there are these small interjections where you have to assume the scribe has given her a look or similar and she steps out of the story to respond to what they’re doing/saying. It felt just like being told the story in a group of friends where at least one other person has been there for some events and is jumping in (although we don’t hear the scribe’s voice during these interjections). I did listen to a few chapters of the audiobook to see how this worked and can confirm it was really clear this was happening in the audio as well. I felt this was a really realistic way of telling the story – I myself jump around so much when telling stories that I actually often lose where I am because I’ve gone off on a tangent. 

We also have a variety of other stories that are related to Amina’s sprinkled throughout the account. I liked how these were carefully inserted at appropriate moments – they made sense and reading them when I did allowed me to make the connections to what was happening in the main story. 

It’s very clear how much research Chakraborty has done and the historian in me enjoyed learning about this period through the lens of a fictional account (recognising of course that it’s not a 100% accurate portrayal – and Chakraborty takes care to state in the her author note that history is ever changing as we learn new things or re-evaluate our previously-held beliefs). Something about historical fantasy just speaks to me and having been intrigued since watching the author talk about this series at an online event a few years ago, it has been lovely seeing those hints come to life in the book. 

We do spend quite a lot of the story travelling and I know that doesn’t work for everyone. It also moved quite slowly. I was actually quite surprised how well this worked for me. The slower pace allowed me to really step back and savour what I was reading, rather than speed reading through fast-paced and tension-filled action. That’s not to say of course that there wasn’t tension, just that I appreciated the build up to that tension. 

There is also a lot of mystery to the story. I spent a lot of time asking questions based on what I was reading, and the desire to find out the answers to those questions really kept me engaged in what was happening. I was constantly making connections in my head based on the snippets I were learning from our very cagey cast of characters. 

In terms of the characters, I really liked the different personalities we had, and it was refreshing to have a slightly older cast. In Amina you could really see the struggle between her longing for a life of adventure and her commitment and love for her daughter. I thought it was really interesting to see this play out and I’m intrigued to see how this continues in later books. I liked the friendship between Amina and her immediate crew and seeing how well they worked together – the result of their years of friendship – but also the things they hid from each other and the ‘break down’ of their relationships as a result. It was a small circle of friends, but a realistic portrayal of friendship as you get older, or at least the types of friendships I have now. 

I’m so glad I finally got up the courage to give this a go – and it was nice to see some small hints of connection to the Daevabad trilogy. I am really interested to see where it goes next as, while there are a few questions from the end of this book, I do think this would have worked perfectly well as a standalone. Definitely one of my favourites of this year – and my second 5 star set at sea, maybe a new niche for my reading?