The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi, by Shannon Chakraborty

I’ve been waiting awhile for Shannon Chakraborty, whose Daevabad Trilogy I loved so much, to come out with the first volume in her new series, but at last it is here! And it’s just as rich, exciting and engaging as City of Brass and its sequels — maybe even more.

This novel falls into a category I’d call “historical fantasy,” in that it’s very firmly located in the real world in a real place and time (in this case, the Arabian Sea and the lands around it, about a thousand years ago in the era of the Crusades). The fantasy elements come into it when creatures from the mythology and folklore of that time and place turn out to be all too real — like, for example, Amina’s not-quite-human ex-husband.

Amina Al-Sirafi is a retired pirate, a devout but not always totally observant Muslim, a mother who is deeply concerned for her daughter’s safety, a middle-aged woman with a lot of secrets in her past. When she’s lured back to her old ship and her old crew for just one more job, it turns out to be a far more complicated task than it originally seemed to be, bringing her into contact not just with the aforementioned ex-husband but with a number of other dangerous enemies and possibly even more dangerous allies, some more human than others. It’s an absolutely fun, rollicking romp on the high seas with the added twist of a heroine who is neither your average swashbuckling pirate nor a wide-eyed young ingenue, but a woman of age, experience, and responsibilities. This isn’t a perspective we often get in fantasy novels, and I’m very glad this is slated to be the first of Amina’s adventures and not the last.