Rebel of the Sands by Alwyn Hamilton - 3*

[Emily]

I did myself a bit of a disservice with this book by going in with per-conceived ideas of which characters would turn out certain ways, when the book never actually gave any hints that it would turn out that way. So that's a shame, as it is actually a fairly well-structured novel with an actually flawed heroine (not one who is sort of flawed but mostly just a special snowflake like a lot of YA heroines) and some fun side characters.

The setting is quite unique, it's a kind of industrialised Middle-Eastern-inspired desert setting, though pinning down a quasi-time-period for it was hard, as some things seemed quite modern, especially the language, but other things seemed quite old-fashioned.

Overall, I'm not dying to read a follow-up to this book, but it was a good setup for future books, and it's the sort of thing where the fancy might just strike me to pick up the next one once it's out.

[Anita]

Did you go in with the pre-conceived notions just based on earlier books in the series? Or did someone set the stage for you inappropriately before you picked it up?

[Emily]

Anita wrote: "Did you go in with the pre-conceived notions just based on earlier books in the series? Or did someone set the stage for you inappropriately before you picked it up?"

It was actually my own fault for deciding the blurb and reviews meant certain things when they didn't. Like it's a Middle-Eastern-inspired setting and there's a character called Jin, so I automatically assumed (view spoiler)[ that he would be a djinn, which wasn't the case at all, and was actually never implied (hide spoiler)] (<-- that's something that turns out to not be the case,sort of a spoiler, I guess?). So really, no one to blame but myself!