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

by Shannon Chakraborty

For everyone who’s set aside their own dreams, briefly or forever, to lift those of the next generation.

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.

My ancestors had attuned their lives to the sea for far too long for me to forget its rhythms.

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.

He who dares does while he who fears fails,’”

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.

I would not want her to believe that because she was born a girl, she cannot dream.”

Now, I have kissed many men. More men than I have married (though less in recent years due to the return to the path of righteousness and the realization that very few are worth it).

Names are for tombstones. And us? We are not yet dead.”

Living things liked being free.

“No!” I shot to my feet, but not even my new speed would get me across the chamber in time. However, I did have time to rip off my boot and hurl it at the Moon of Saba with enough force to send the lovely, priceless historical artifact spinning out of Falco’s hands and toppling to the dirty floor.

“And here I thought you liked your women fierce,” I challenged, dodging a stream of hissing roaches. “Or is that only when you can spy on them in the bath, you petty, perverted excuse for a planet?”

wasn’t this accursed demon or spirit of discord or whatever he called himself putting alien desires in my soul: I wanted to travel the world and sail every sea. I wanted to have adventures, to be a hero, to have my tales told in courtyards and street fairs, where perhaps kids who’d grown up like me, with more imagination than means, might be inspired to dream. Where women who were told there was only one sort of respectful life for them could listen to tales of another who’d broken away—and thrived when she’d done so.

and I was learning, many years too late, that I could not control the hearts of those around me. I had lived a daring life. I had fought for my ambitions. I could not deny others theirs.

“I’m going to make it completely historically accurate except for the plot”