The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi (Amina Al-Sirafi #1) Review (Audiobook)

Book: The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi (Amina Al-Sirafi #1)

Author: Shannon Chakraborty

Narrators: Lameece Issaq, Amin El-Gamal

BECHDEL TEST: PASS-Amina and Dalila discuss Dalila’s work with poisons.

Content Warnings: Violence, death, gore, murder, blood, body horror, injury/injury detail, torture, grief, misogyny, kidnapping, toxic relationship, animal death, gaslighting, body shaming, confinement, genocide, sexism, slavery, transphobia, vomit, religious bigotry, infidelity, physical abuse, sexual violence, xenophobia, cannibalism, death of a parent, classism, abandonment, colonisation, war

I did say at the beginning of this year that I would try and get back to a more frequent schedule with my reviews and have them up within a decent time of reading the book…..well it’s now August and I finished this book in April: WELP. But anyway, this was one of my most anticipated releases of this year, I loved Shannon Chakraborty’s Daevabad trilogy so I was super excited for her first work outside of that series and let’s face it female pirates are like catnip for me so this one was always going to be a no-brainer, automatic read for me. I’m happy to say that I did really enjoy it, I loved the characters, and all in all I found it a very fun read, despite it being somewhat slow in places. Here is a synopsis of the book:

Shannon Chakraborty, the bestselling author of The City of Brass, launches a new trilogy of magic and mayhem with this tale of pirates and sorcerers, forbidden artefacts and ancient mysteries, and one woman’s quest to seize a final chance at glory… (I didn’t realise how little it gave away about the actual story, I barely even looked at the synopsis before I added this one to my TBR tbh!).

I have to start with Amina as she was one of the things I loved most about this book (though she may have been slightly outshone by one of her companions but I’ll get onto that in a little bit). Amina was just absolutely everything I love in a character, she had a brilliantly dry, sarcastic sense of humour, a great sense of adventure and a strangely endearing world-weariness of a woman who has seen a lot in her life. I really loved getting to see a middle aged woman as the heroine of a fantasy novel as you really don’t get to see that enough. I also really loved how sex positive she was, it was awesome to see a woman in her forties portrayed as that sexually liberated. She was just such a fun and engaging character to follow and I hope that we start seeing more middle aged women as fantasy heroines off the back of this.

Amina’s crew were an equally fun bunch. Dalila was my favourite and actually my favourite character of the entire book (sorry Amina but your mistress of poisons did outshine you!), I was simultaneously terrified of her and found her absolutely hilarious. The woman wears a bonnet covered in poison bottles, how could you not love that? She also has just the most brilliant biting wit which makes her interactions with the rest of the crew so much fun: I loved the dynamic between her and Amina, it was possibly my favourite in the book, the way they constantly rib at each other but ultimately have each other’s backs was very endearing. I also found the back and forth banter between Dalila and Tinbu hilarious. Basically, Dalila is my queen and Shannon Chakraborty can take this as my official petition for a book all about Dalila please! Though I have mostly talked just about Amina and Dalila, I really did love Majed and Tinbu as well, the four of them had such a fun dynamic as a group which made the story very engaging to read.

Now this story is told from two points of view, we have Amina herself, telling her own story but we also have a second character, a scribe, whom Amina is dictating her story to (so essentially future Amina is narrating her past adventures). I didn’t love this: I found that the scribe portions of the story disrupted the flow of the main action and every time we went back to him, I just wanted to go back to Amina. It becomes clear at the end why Chakraborty chose this device, but honestly, I would have preferred it if the story had been solely from Amina’s POV as I don’t feel the scribe portions really added much. I also didn’t find the narrator for the scribe (Amin El-Gamal) as engaging as Amina’s narrator (Lameece Isaaq) and would have much preferred if she had just narrated the whole book herself. I also had a major issue with one of the production choices for the scribe chapter: Amina would do this little asides to the scribe, off mic, so she would physically turn away from the microphone and the volume would get so quiet so you could barely hear what she said. I found this irritating both because I wanted to know what Amina was saying, but also it just frustrated me on a practical level because it took me out of the story every time it happened because I was wondering if something was wrong with my headphones!

This book did have a couple of the same issues that plagued Chakraborty’s Daevabad series for me. One was the extremely lengthy chapters: I’ve talked about this before here, but I am a short chapter person, all the way. It gives books a better flow, and it means I’m less likely to have to put a book down in the middle of a chapter (you’d think that would be less of a problem with an audiobook but you can still end up stopping mid-sentence!). The chapters in this book were generally between about 20-50 minutes (with some longer and some shorter) and I definitely prefer all my chapters to come in around the 20 minute mark. There were a lot of chapters in this book that were between 40-50 minutes and that just didn’t work well for me, I would have preferred more but shorter chapters as opposed to fewer but longer ones.

As with the Daevabad trilogy, there were also some pacing issues with this one. I actually didn’t mind for most of the book, I did notice it could be slow paced at times (especially in the beginning and there was some lagging in the middle) but I was generally so invested in Amina and her crew that I didn’t really care, and there were a lot of action sequences throughout the book to keep me engaged: Chakraborty did a really great job with the action sequences actually, they were all very exciting and intense and there was one particular battle where I was genuinely very scared for Amina (even though because of the framing device, we know she’s okay). Where the pacing somewhat fell down for me was the end: because of the very slow set-up, it did feel like the ending chapters were somewhat rushed and what should have been a really climactic final battle ended up feeling slightly wild and rushed and I think had Chakraborty picked up the pace a little sooner, it would have allowed for a slightly more satisfying final climax.

I enjoyed the writing style on the whole, I found Chakraborty’s writing fun and engaging and she is so good at really immersing you into a world with her descriptions (I don’t picture things in my head as I read, but I definitely felt like I could be there). However, my slight gripe with this which wasn’t really an issue in the Daevabad trilogy because it’s third person: as this is Amina’s first person POV, some of Chakraborty’s more flowery descriptions just didn’t really fit. Amina is not a flowery person and it felt somewhat incongruous to her character that she would describe things in the way that Chakraborty had her doing: I personally as someone who doesn’t hugely care about description would maybe have sacrificed some of the pretty descriptions in order to keep the authentic character voice.

The dialogue in this was absolutely fantastic, it was so funny, so sharp and the interactions between Amina and her crew were just *chef’s kiss*.

I loved the the cast was so diverse, they’re all POC and we have a couple of queer characters too, plus the entirety of the main quartet of characters (Amina, Dalila, Tinbu and Majed) are all middle aged.

The world Chakraborty created here was really great, and unlike Daevabad, full of real places. She painted such a vivid picture of all the different peoples and cultures surrounding the Indian Ocean in the 12th century and I loved that unlike in Daevabad where we’re confined to a relatively small area for most of the series, we got to see a wide expanse of countries on Amina’s travels: it really felt like Chakraborty immersed you in this world.

She’d also very clearly done a lot of research to get the setting just right which I really appreciated, I love seeing authors give that much attention to detail for the historical settings of their books.

I do appreciate that the map of the world was included in the audiobook in an accompanying PDF, but I wish I had realised it before I started rather than after I finished the book!

I love when books have animals in them and Payasam, the useless ship cat was an absolute delight and I hope she continues to make appearances in future books (THE CAT IS FINE. I PROMISE. NO DEAD CATS HERE.). I found it absolutely hilarious how much of a liking she took to Amina when Amina clearly hated her, because that is just such a cat thing to do.

There is a gender identity exploration storyline in this book which I thought was treated with a great deal of compassion and care, though I am not a member of the trans community, so I do recommend searching out own-voices reviews for an accurate picture of how good that rep is.

There were lots of really great twists and reveals throughout the story, but one particular reveal was especially good though I really can’t say anything more without getting into spoiler territory.

I loved how Chakraborty explored the nuances of motherhood in this. Amina clearly loves her daughter Marjana and is a devoted mother but she has so many other facets to her identity too and it’s clear that whilst she misses her daughter at sea, she also revels in rediscovering her pirate identity and I just loved getting to see a mother in a story who isn’t portrayed as a bad or neglectful mother for being a multi-faceted person with interests outside of her child. I’m very intrigued as to how Marjana may factor in to future books, she plays a fairly minor role in this one but the ending of the book kind of hints that she’ll have more of a role in future books and without getting to deep into it as we’d be heading into spoiler territory, I’m intrigued as to how some of the reveals from this book around her will play out.

I liked the little Daevabad connections in this book (I won’t spoil what they are), there are some nice little Easter eggs for fans of that series and the two books are set in the same world, but you don’t have to have read the Daevabad trilogy to understand this one, it is a separate story with different characters (although we do get a small crossover with one of the characters from Daevabad but I totally didn’t realise that’s who that character was until I’d finished the book!).

Chakraborty created some great villains in this: Falco, the main “baddie” of the piece was properly terrifying and clearly capable of inflicting great damage and then on the opposite end of the spectrum you have Raksh, Amina’s demon sort-of ex-husband who is more irritating and mostly useless but obviously fairly nefarious underneath. I did want to slap Raksh most of the time, but his and Amina’s bickering was very entertaining. I would have liked it if Amina and Falco had crossed paths sooner though-he plays the role of off-page nemesis for a little too long and it did lessen the stakes somewhat having the villain be faceless for the first half of the book.

I liked that the characters’ faiths played a part in this without it feeling preachy (most of the characters are Muslim like the author, but Dalila and Tinbu are not, Dalila is Christian and Tinbu, I’m not sure if his faith is specifically mentioned, but he’s not Muslim). I hate when religion in books feels like the author is trying to convert you and this definitely wasn’t that. I liked seeing that Amina was committed to her faith but knew that she wasn’t perfect, she’s always trying her best to be a good Muslim but recognises that she hasn’t always made the best decisions. I though Chakraborty had a really lovely, nuanced take on faith in this.

I really enjoyed that romance wasn’t really a part of this story at all-the focus was on Amina and her adventures and her relationship with her crew-obviously Raksh does come into the story later on and it’s revealed quite early on that they had previously been involved, but she really hates him, so it’s definitely more bickering than actual romance!

I did find it a little light on the fantasy elements in the beginning, at first it seemed that it was going to be more historical than fantasy, but thankfully the fantastical elements didn’t take too long to kick in and I really enjoyed them. There was one fantastical part that felt a little like what I imagine a drug trip would feel like, but it was still a lot of fun! Honestly this book really had me back on the fantasy train after not really reading much fantasy in the last couple of years, it reminded me why I enjoy fantasy so much: the adventure, the escapism, the immersion…..it’s all just so, so good and it’s been a while since I’ve really felt that way about anything fantasy!

There were a few little deus ex machina moments throughout the book, conveniences that helped Amina get out of situations when she really shouldn’t have been able to or situations where she really likely would have died, I can forgive these somewhat because as a writer I do understand that sometimes you just need to get your characters to a certain point and there’s no other way to do it but I hope she relies less on these kinds of conveniences in future books.

I love the budding friendship between Amina and the Socotran Pirate (whose name I cannot for the life of me remember) and I hope we see more of him in future books because I’d like to see that friendship develop a little more.

I already knew this was going to be a series, but it was looking like it was going tro wrap up well as a standalone so I was unsure where Chakraborty was going to take this, until part of the story where Amina is given a “task” that was obviously intended to be the setup for the rest of the series. I’m so looking forward to seeing how that all plays out and so excited for whatever Amina’s next adventures will be.

Overall this was another really stellar book from Chakraborty and easily my favourite book of this year thus far! I think it may actually be my favourite overall Chakraborty book as well? Bold statement, but I think I’m going there. I love the characters so much, the story was so fun and I can’t wait to see where the series goes next, even if it might be a couple of years before we get the next book.

My Rating: 4/5

My next review will be of The Luminaries by Susan Dennard, we are slowly catching up to my most recent read, it’s probably a good thing I’ve been reading so slowly this year because catching up with 20 odd reviews would be near on impossible!