The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi (Amina al-Sirafi, #1)

by Shannon Chakraborty

these things that men obsess over when they hate what they desire and desire what they cannot possess.

For this scribe has read a great many of these accounts and taken away another lesson: that to be a woman is to have your story misremembered. Discarded. Twisted.

Biographers polish away the jagged edges of capable, ruthless queens so they may be remembered as saints, and geographers warn believing men away from such and such a place with scandalous tales of lewd local females who cavort in the sea and ravish foreign interlopers. Women are the forgotten spouses and unnamed daughters. Wet nurses and handmaidens; thieves and harlots. Witches. A titillating anecdote to tell your friends back home or a warning.

Ah yes, a certain degree of rebelliousness is expected from youth. It is why we have stories of treasure-seeking princesses and warrior women that end with the occasional happiness. But they are expected to end—with the boy, the prince, the sailor, the adventurer. The man that will take her maidenhood, grant her children, make her a wife. The man who defines her. He may continue his epic—he may indeed take new wives and make new children!—but women’s stories are expected to dissolve into a fog of domesticity . . . if they’re told at all.

People have this idea of mothers, that we are soft and gentle and sweet. As though the moment my daughter was laid on my breast, the phrase I would do anything did not take on a depth I could have never understood before.

a little madness goes a long way in convincing men that you might stab them if they step out of line.

How much easier her life would be if she were rich. For while the pious claim money doesn’t buy happiness, I can attest from personal experience that poverty buys nothing.

They wanted me safe? Then I would go to the most dangerous person I knew.

“We are friends,” I reminded myself under my breath, working up some courage. “And friends do not murder each other without warning.”

One of the blessings of age is the waning of certain men’s eyes, of that stare that fixes upon you when you are a girl too young to notice. The men who do not lower their gaze as is commanded by our faith, but instead steal second and third glances; the men who hiss the vulgarest of obscenities and when called out, blame their behavior on your clothes, your smile or lack thereof, your pretty eyes, your very existence.

And yes, I know what the Holy Book says—but does it not also tell us to use our eyes and our hearts?

Men find it easier to believe they have been swindled by a witch than outwitted by a woman.

For the greatest crime of the poor in the eyes of the wealthy has always been to strike back. To fail to suffer in silence and instead disrupt their lives and their fantasies of a compassionate society that coincidentally set them on top. To say no.

if God had not meant for such diversity, he would have made us all alike.