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supaanhanh 's review for:
The Ashfire King
by Chelsea Abdullah
adventurous
emotional
reflective
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
“Neither here nor there, but not so long ago…”
Picking up where The Stardust Thief ended, Loulie and Mazen, accompanied by the mercurial ifrit Rijah, have fallen through the Sandsea into the world that Qadir sealed off with his magic. But the jinn world is on edge, the magic bindings put in place to keep it separate from the human world are failing, threatening to sink the cities even further into the Sandsea. Loulie and Mazen are caught between two powerful ifrits, unsure who they can trust: the Queen of the jinn who wants the bindings repaired to protect what’s left of the jinn world, or the pirate Nabila who has her own intentions of wanting to break the bindings and restore the jinn cities to the surface world.
It’s always difficult for a sequel to capture the wonder of its predecessor but I felt like The Ashfire King did a good job in replicating that magic and introducing a new world for our characters to navigate. And it wasn’t just the world-building that expanded, the characters themselves have been fleshed out more thoroughly and grown beyond what they were portrayed as in the previous book. And in the fashion of Arabian Nights, the built-in stories peppered in throughout allow the reader to piece together the centuries of history and relate to the book’s central plot without it being too cumbersome.
Overall, The Ashfire King successfully navigated the quagmire of the dreaded second-book syndrome, wrapping up the central plot and growing the characters we’ve come to love while setting up the key plot points for the last book.
Thank you to NetGalley, Orbit Books for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review!
Picking up where The Stardust Thief ended, Loulie and Mazen, accompanied by the mercurial ifrit Rijah, have fallen through the Sandsea into the world that Qadir sealed off with his magic. But the jinn world is on edge, the magic bindings put in place to keep it separate from the human world are failing, threatening to sink the cities even further into the Sandsea. Loulie and Mazen are caught between two powerful ifrits, unsure who they can trust: the Queen of the jinn who wants the bindings repaired to protect what’s left of the jinn world, or the pirate Nabila who has her own intentions of wanting to break the bindings and restore the jinn cities to the surface world.
It’s always difficult for a sequel to capture the wonder of its predecessor but I felt like The Ashfire King did a good job in replicating that magic and introducing a new world for our characters to navigate. And it wasn’t just the world-building that expanded, the characters themselves have been fleshed out more thoroughly and grown beyond what they were portrayed as in the previous book. And in the fashion of Arabian Nights, the built-in stories peppered in throughout allow the reader to piece together the centuries of history and relate to the book’s central plot without it being too cumbersome.
Overall, The Ashfire King successfully navigated the quagmire of the dreaded second-book syndrome, wrapping up the central plot and growing the characters we’ve come to love while setting up the key plot points for the last book.
Thank you to NetGalley, Orbit Books for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review!