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The Wrath and the Dawn
Renee Ahdieh
432 pages
Published April 5, 2016 by Penguin Young Readers Group
“When I was a little girl in Thebes, I remember asking my mother what heaven was. She replied, ‘A heart where love dwells.’ Of course, I then demanded to know what constituted hell. She looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘A heart absent love.”
This may be my favorite quote of the book. Or maybe…
“We women are a sad lot, aren’t we? … Strong enough to take on the world with our bare hands, yet we permit ridiculous boys to make fools of us”.
I did love the writing style of this author throughout the story. The relationship between Shazi and Khalid begins under false pretenses on both their parts which is a great way for love stories to begin. Shazi volunteers to marry Khalid in an effort to get close to him, expose his weaknesses and then ultimately kill him. Khalid marries Shazi so that she may be killed the following morning, as the many, many previous wives before her, because ……well, that’s a secret and I won’t spoil it for you.
Such a cool way to begin a story. I will say though, Shazi has many opportunities to take out the King (the whole reason she is there) and chose not to. Even before she began to have feelings for him.
“She had come to the palace with a singleminded purpose: to discover her enemy’s weakness and destroy him with it.”
So this part of the story did not ring true to me. If you sacrifice yourself to get close to your enemy so you can take him out, but then you choose to not complete your self-imposed mission, knowing that instead YOU will die for nothing, what’s the point? I felt this was a real weakness of the story. Had Shazi been FORCED to marry the King, then thought to plot against him but waivered once she began to get to know him, that would have been a much better story beginning. As it stands and the way the book was written, with Shazi having full intentions of completing this act and then just deciding not to…… that’s a big plot fail for me.
Of course, readers are glad she doesn’t and the rest of the book goes along as it should. The story becomes more interesting and yes, I did shed a tear or two at a certain heartfelt part. The author certainly knows how to bring characters together and the writing does well with promoting imagery without getting mired in excessive details.
Also, there is a backstory of Shiva having unknow magical powers passed down from her father. There is a bit of focus on her father enhancing his magic but that storyline is all broken and choppy and really out of focus. As far as Shiva’s magic storyline, it’s brought up a couple of times and then just drops out of the story. Really weird. I guess maybe it will be in Book 2?
Up until the last few chapters I was thinking I would rate this barely a 3 and I wouldn’t be moving on to book 2. But fortunately (or unfortunately for readers of the first part of the book) most of the action takes place in the last few chapters which of course hooks you in to picking up Book 2. So onward I go, to find Book 2 after rating this title a very solid 3 stars.
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