From the line, "I wish you were in your lizard shape," I was hooked. It’s a book that sometimes gets a little goofy, but most of the time feels lushly mythological.

In this book, we follow two main characters. One is Loulie, a merchant of magic. With her father-figure jinn, she travels the desert searching for magical artifacts to sell (don't worry, it's only kind of illegal piracy). The other main character is Mazen, a sheltered prince who wants adventure (and to get away from his dysfunctional family).

In this story, pretty much everyone has a secret. This creates the most delicious irony as the ramifications of those secrets grow more and more dire. Much drama is created through those secrets, and it is all earned. It isn’t just cheap melodrama, because it’s set up from the beginning how much these secrets means to all the characters.

The story is also driven by many small conflicts. There is the larger conflict of the main plot, of course. But there are always smaller conflicts between the characters that get created and resolved. It makes each scene feel important and the entire book feel fast paced.

The one thing about this book that didn’t work for me was the ending. The larger plot only feels half-resolved, and the other half left to the sequel. Additionally, some of the character arcs culminated in moments that I didn’t feel were earned by who the characters were in the first half of the book.

A video review including this book will be on my Youtube channel in the coming weeks, at https://www.youtube.com/chloefrizzle

Thanks to Orbit and NetGalley for giving me a copy of this book to review. All opinions are my own.