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.

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.

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

For while the pious claim money doesn’t buy happiness, I can attest from personal experience that poverty buys nothing.

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.

“It is not always easy to do the right thing, Amina al-Sirafi. More often than not, it is a lonely, thankless ordeal. That does not mean it is not worth doing.”