Forgettable Djinns

Sep 2019
The City of Brass - S.A. Chakraborty – HarperVoyager, 2017
* *
This book was an airport read for a punishingly early flight which may explain why I forgot all about it until I saw it in my e-reader the other day. It's a perfectly serviceable Arabian fantasy featuring Nahri, an off-the-peg female thief in Cairo who accidentally summons a dodgy djinn called Dara and gets mixed up in some overly complex magical politics. The use of Islamic and Middle Eastern folklore is interesting, but the descriptions of fantastical locations are very bland and the relationship between Nahri and Dara, where she basically effaces herself to please him, left a bad taste in the mouth.

Novella Round-up 2019

As I have said before, I like the fact that e-readers make the short-form novel commercially viable, but having read a number of them this year, I can see that the format leads to a number of common problems. You can take as read the criticisms that all the books in this list were too short, with simplistic plots and characters that did not have the narrative space to become especially rich and memorable. However, I think it is important to acknowledge and encourage them, because they offer a mouthpiece for perspectives different from those of the white middle-class writers that have dominated SF and fantasy up to now.
( Read more... )