I ended up liking this book quite a bit. It was a tiny bit rocky for me at first—it felt like it was falling into some first novel traps—but by the end I was really into it, and I’m definitely finishing out the trilogy.
The blurb makes it seem like Loulie—a young woman in her twenties who goes by the Midnight Merchant, because she sells magical relics in the black market—is the only protagonist. But we’ve also got two more! I appreciated that depth of POV and thought it made up for a lot of the book’s weaknesses in the first hundred pages, before it really found its footing. The other two main characters are Mazen, the youngest son of the Sultan (who was married to this world’s version of Scheherazade, because this is a reimagining, not a retelling, of The Thousand and One Nights); and Aisha, one of the legendary Forty Thieves, who in this version are run by the eldest son of the Sultan, and whose business is killing jinn.
These three, along with Loulie’s jinn bodyguard Qadir (who is disguised as a human to avoid being murdered and stuff) are sent on a quest by the Sultan to track down a long-rumored relic that is immensely powerful, but rumored to be hidden somewhere in the Sandsea, a magical region of sand that flows like water, under which the home of the jinn lies.
Things seemed pretty simplistic to me plot-wise and character-wise at the beginning, but unexpected things kept happening (as well as predictable things, lets be honest: SPOILERS I called that Qadir was the King of the Jinn near the beginning END SPOILERS and the book more than held my attention the whole way through.
I’m interested to see where the author takes this story.
