Foz Meadows's Reviews > Throne of the Crescent Moon

Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed
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really liked it

For a number of reasons, this book starts out quite shakily. The overwrought ye olde dialogue of Mouw Awa in the opening passages, for instance, is an instant mood-killer, while the first couple of chapters contain multiple instances of narrative double-handling and stock trope usage. Add to this the fact that Adoulla and Raseed appear to be cut from stock character cloth - the Old Guy Tired Of This Shit and the Young Buck Chafing At His Master's Moral Ambiguity - and I was more than a little apprehensive. The appearance of Zamia, whose eye-colour is described no less than *three times* in the space of a single page, only seems to compound the problem: she is the Feisty Waif-Fu Warrior Girl On A Mission Of Vengeance, and she and Raseed fall in love seemingly on the basis of a single conversation.

There were some notable discontinuities in the plot, too: in the opening chapters, Adoulla is reading a beloved book that magically disappears from the narrative, while later there's some confusion about whether crimson mercury is rendered useless by exposure to open air, and though minor, they nonetheless stood out. I also didn't buy Raseed and Zamia's attraction: despite all the lampshade hanging from the other characters about the follies ofyouthful infatuation and love at first sight, it never felt anything other than contrived, while the frankly irritating and repetitious description of Zamia's 'emerald eyes' tripped me up with every iteration.

However.

Despite these pitfalls, the prose style steadily evens out, helped in large part by the fact that Throne is not really the action-epic its blurb suggests. Instead, it's more of a character study, and once Dawoud and Litaz - the latter being my favourite character - appear and are given space to comment on the foibles of the other three protagonists, things improve markedly. Given the obvious horror of the ghuls and Orshado's plans, there's something weirdly gentle about the book itself: the plot is moved forwards by a series of small, personally-relevant milestones that nonetheless tie in to larger events, so that even though the ultimate outcome - saving the world - is achieved, the whole thing feels less like a grandiose epic and more like dropping in on a group of friends.

It's this quality, and the strength of (particularly the later) characterisation, that made the book work for me. Exploring the personal brought out the setting of Dhamsawaat more clearly than plain description might have done, and there's a pleasant dearth of infodumping, particularly by the usual standards of epic. (Not that I don't enjoy a good infodump - it just has to be done right.) Ahmed uses his multiple POVs well, never staying overlong in one or skimping another, so that all the characters felt fleshed-out by the end. There were a number of nice grace notes too, most notably in the friendship between Litaz, Adoulla and Dawoud, while the incorporation of religion into the setting and character dialogue was done very deftly. True, the character archetypes were familiar, particularly in the context a of Middle Eastern setting, but that's hardly unusual; and while the very commonality of it is itself a problem, it's not something I can fault Ahmed for exclusively. (Having just read Castle in the Air by Diana Wynne Jones and Habibi by Craig Thompson, for instance, it feels easy to say that, especially with Litaz's character, Ahmed did a better job of transcending stereotype than either; and certainly, his portrayals of faith, sexism and masculinity were much more nuanced and complex. The fact that he alone of these three authors has Middle Eastern ancestry doesn't seem an irrelevant factor in this.)

All in all, I enjoyed Throne of the Crescent Moon, though not for the reasons I'd initially thought I would. Despite its uneasy beginnings, it was a quick, readable novel with a neat resolution, and one that I'd cheerfully recommend.
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Reading Progress

April 25, 2012 – Started Reading
April 25, 2012 – Shelved
April 25, 2012 –
page 6
2.19%
April 25, 2012 –
page 9
3.28% "Not bad so far, bar some narrative double-handling, but points off for starting a sentence with the words "Back when he'd been a street brawling youth on Dead Donkey Lane". I'll take that sort of nomenclature from Tamora Pierce and Terry Pratchett, but nine pages in to a new author's debut, it's a little on the nose."
April 25, 2012 –
page 25
9.12% "A small point, this, but Adoulla's book has fallen out of the narrative. He had it at the tea shop, we learned it was a treasured and expensive item, but when he got up to leave there was no mention that he brought it with him, and nor did it reappear when he got home. A minor discontinuity, but a discontinuity nonetheless."
April 25, 2012 –
page 49
17.88% "The story is flowing well, and I'm enjoying myself. But even by my standards, mentioning a character's eye colour three times in the course of a single page - 'eyes like green fire,' 'green-eyed little girl', 'emerald eyes' - is pushing it."
April 25, 2012 –
page 63
22.99% "Personal bugbear the first: so Zamia can shapeshift clothes as well as flesh? People so often gloss this point as a convenience with shapeshifting, and it bugs me.\n \n Personal bugbear the second: so Raseed is apparently the only man to ever make Zamia think about romance? They just met, and she's already thinking about marriage and kids to restart her clan essentially because he smells nice! GAH."
April 25, 2012 –
page 103
37.59% "Raseed is worrying he loves Zamia. They've had ONE CONVERSATION. *facepalm*"
April 25, 2012 –
page 143
52.19% "I'm confused. On page 119, Raseed was told he had a strict time limit to get the crimson quicksilver to Litaz because the seal had been broken and open air was creeping in - implying that it would be ruined somehow, or made worthless. But now she's talking about using more of it tomorrow?"
April 25, 2012 –
page 187
68.25% "OK, that last scene with Litaz and the Humble Students was pretty cool. She is now my favourite character."
April 25, 2012 –
page 197
71.9%
April 25, 2012 – Finished Reading

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