This was simultaneously colorful and extremely grey. 

 

There should be no doubt this is dark fantasy. It starts with the villain doing terribly villainous and also terrifying things. It does not exactly ever get "pretty," because this is not a pretty universe. The good guys, while easy to root for, are not perfect at all and are occasionally annoying, both to the reader and to each other. They don't get along. They fight about stupid things and have character flaws and rub each other the wrong way.

 

These people are awesome. 

 

Adoulla is the heart of the novel, and is probably the most likeable of the characters. It's interesting to have an older man as the main character--he's a good man, but he is so tired of what he has to do. His job as a ghul hunter is exhausting, but it is a burden he feels he can't put down, and that belief drives him further than he thinks he can manage a lot of the time.

 

Raseed feels very Galahad-like. I should probably further explain that one of my earlier and probably my most-defining experience of Galahad was from Nancy McKenzie's Grail Prince, where he is pretty much a super religious warrior who has some questionable interactions regarding ladies and also older men to whom he should be listening. He thinks he knows better than anyone what God wants of him at all times and is not generous in his judgements of others. Raseed, just like Galahad, does eventually learn a bit better (just a bit, mind), but his progress is glacial and while interesting as a character in that he acts as a foil to several of the others, he isn't exactly fun.

 

Zamia seems like a moderately standard warrior woman in a culture that doesn't understand or like them, but she has a few hidden depths and she manages to feel like a real person, even when I find her behavior occasionally annoying. She is proud, and she has a right to be. She is also proud as a way of handling the fact that she has never felt accepted in her role as warrior, and that causes its own set of issues for her as she struggles through her feelings about her place in the world.

 

The plot is a bit complicated in a few ways, given it is kind of a sword-and-sorcery novel wrapped around a dark fantasy evil overlord novel tied up with a bow of political intrigue and revolution. It's a lot of fun, admittedly, and I loved how everything tied together and where things ended up going. Tracking what was going on was sometimes a bit tricky, but I get the feeling that was intentional--if you knew exactly where things were going early on and who you could trust, where would the fun be?

 

The setting is amazing. I loved it. I have always adored fantasy, but I loved seeing an entirely different set of tropes and traditions in play here. I hadn't realized what a terrible waste it was to have so few fantasy novels set in a sort of Arabian Nights-esque universe. It comes with what feels like a new set of monsters and place names and assumptions on government and religion that just feels very refreshing.

 

I don't quite want to say I liked the ending, because it was kind of dark and admittedly did not handle all of the things I was hoping that it would (though I thought it did handle all the things it had to handle), but I felt like it was just perfect. I was comfortable with the idea of this as a stand-alone novel, because I felt like it did everything it really needed to do in terms of allowing for closure, but I was ecstatic to discover there is going to be a sequel and I can't wait to read it.