First of all, Merry Christmas to everyone reading this (the ones who celebrate Christmas of course). I hope you have a wonderful evening/day.
Today, as promised, I wanted to give you my full review on "A Thousand Nights" by E.K. Johnston. I stumbled across this book because Sasha from abookutopia talked about it in one of her videos and I found it sounded intriguing. I read it at the beginning of this month and here are my thoughts. I hope I can keep this spoiler-free.
Before I talk about the story, I'd like to take a moment to talk about how absolutely gorgeous this cover design is. This book made me happy every time I picked it up for the simple reason that it is so pretty. I usually don't buy hardcovers because, you know, they're expensive, but this time I decided just to go for it and it felt so good. Everything about this book is beautifully designed, from the dust jacket to the page at the start of each chapter. If my opinion was purely based on aesthetics, this book would get 5/5 stars.
But, alas, it is not. So let's get to the most important part of a book: what is actually about. This is what the dustjacket reads: "Lo-Melkhiin killed three hundred girls before he came to my village, looking for a wife.
When Lo-Melkhiin - a formidable king- arrives in the desert with his army, he is determined to take one of the village girls to be his next wife. But one girl, desperate to save her beautiful sister from certain death at his hands, makes the ultimate sacrifice - pushing herself forward instead, and leaving home and family behind to go to her fate with this fearful man.
But a strange magic seems to flow between this girl and Lo-Melkiin; and night after night she manages to survive. Finding power in storytelling, the words she speaks are given strange life of their own. Little things at first: a dress from home, a vision of her sister. But as she dreams bigger she raises more terrible magic, with power enough to save a king... if she can only stop her heart from falling for a monster first..."
If you are familiar with the "1001 Arabian Nights" stories, you can probably tell that this is a very rough re-telling of the story of Scheherazade. To be honest, I wasn't and I had to google it to find that out, after everyone kept on saying that it was a re-telling.
What I thought:
This book was certainly different from many books I've read before and ughh, I really wanted to love it. It had so much potential, but in the end I was pretty underwhelmed. It is not, by any means a bad book. It was just one of those books that didn't leave any lasting impression on me. I didn't hate it, but I didn't love it either.
However, there were some things that I did really loved about this book. The first one being the setting. I have not read many books set in the desert and I loved reading about the traditions and customs of the people the book revolves around. The author is a forensic archaeologist and has spent time in Jordan, as well as studying biblical Hebrew and Arabic. She knows what she's talking about and I really enjoyed that.
Secondly, the writing style was beautiful, very poetic and unique. In the end though, the writing style was also part of the reason why this book fell flat for me. I felt like it created a distance between the reader and the characters that I couldn't work through. It made me as a reader very much feel like a indifferent, distant observer, rather than living the story with and through the main protagonist.
Another reason why I couldn't identify with the characters was that none of them, except the king, have names. It was an interesting concept and at times helpful, because you always knew exactly who the author was talking about (eg. my oldest brother, my sister's mother) but it also contributed to that general feeling of distance.
As the story progressed, I got more and more confused with the way the plot was going. Especially the magic system was introduced very suddenly and without an explanation that I found satisfying. Things started happening and were attributed to the main characters powers and more than once I caught myself thinking "But why? How? Since when?". I already talked about the feeling of distance and that became even stronger throughout the course of the book, so that even in the most dramatic scenes, I wasn't able to feel sympathy for anyone.
In the end, I gave this book 3/5 stars. There were many things I loved, but the plot and character depth/development didn't blow me away at all. I think it definitely helps if you are familiar with and enjoy the "1001 Arabian Nights" stories.
Thanks for reading and happy holidays :)
