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champ81 's review for:
The Ashfire King
by Chelsea Abdullah
adventurous
emotional
mysterious
The Stardust Thief was an incredible start to the Sandsea Trilogy, and I am so pleased that The Ashfire King was as thrilling as its predecessor.
All the characters we love are back--Loulie, Qadir, Mazen, Aisha, Malik--plus several new characters to love and hate. The story picks up right where The Stardust Thief left off: Loulie, Mazen, and the ifrit Rijah have fallen through the Sandsea and into the world that Qadir (the eponymous king) had long before sealed off with ifrit magic. It is a land of jinn struggling to survive as that binding magic begins to fail--whether because of the deaths of the ifrit who created the seals protecting their lands, or because an ifrit named Nabila is using her magic to break the seals. Loulie and Mazen quickly get swept up in the war between Nabila and the jinn queen trying to thwart her, all while trying to figure out how to return to Qadir. Back on the surface, Aisha--still possessed by Amira, the ifrit known as the Resurrectionist--and Malik attempt to free Qadir, who was captured by Omar, the sultan of Madinne and Mazen's duplicitous brother.
This book is cinematic. The scenes are so vividly described and the characters through whom we experience the story (Loulie, Mazen, and Aisha) so richly depicted that it is easy to get lost in this world. Even the birds have personality here. It did seem like a bit of work to set the book up in the beginning, but all the effort paid off by the end when--in scene after scene--meticulously plotted elements from earlier in the story came together. Because the quests both above and below the Sandsea are relatively straightforward, there is more room to develop even minor characters and their histories than might have otherwise been possible in an overly complicated plot.
There are so many loose ends and unanswered questions that are teed up for the final book in the trilogy, as well as a looming problem for our band of wanderers, storytellers, mapmakers, and fighters to overcome. It really was the perfect middle book of a trilogy. I can't wait for the finale!
I received an advance reader copy from Netgalley for an honest review.
All the characters we love are back--Loulie, Qadir, Mazen, Aisha, Malik--plus several new characters to love and hate. The story picks up right where The Stardust Thief left off: Loulie, Mazen, and the ifrit Rijah have fallen through the Sandsea and into the world that Qadir (the eponymous king) had long before sealed off with ifrit magic. It is a land of jinn struggling to survive as that binding magic begins to fail--whether because of the deaths of the ifrit who created the seals protecting their lands, or because an ifrit named Nabila is using her magic to break the seals. Loulie and Mazen quickly get swept up in the war between Nabila and the jinn queen trying to thwart her, all while trying to figure out how to return to Qadir. Back on the surface, Aisha--still possessed by Amira, the ifrit known as the Resurrectionist--and Malik attempt to free Qadir, who was captured by Omar, the sultan of Madinne and Mazen's duplicitous brother.
This book is cinematic. The scenes are so vividly described and the characters through whom we experience the story (Loulie, Mazen, and Aisha) so richly depicted that it is easy to get lost in this world. Even the birds have personality here. It did seem like a bit of work to set the book up in the beginning, but all the effort paid off by the end when--in scene after scene--meticulously plotted elements from earlier in the story came together. Because the quests both above and below the Sandsea are relatively straightforward, there is more room to develop even minor characters and their histories than might have otherwise been possible in an overly complicated plot.
There are so many loose ends and unanswered questions that are teed up for the final book in the trilogy, as well as a looming problem for our band of wanderers, storytellers, mapmakers, and fighters to overcome. It really was the perfect middle book of a trilogy. I can't wait for the finale!
I received an advance reader copy from Netgalley for an honest review.