I picked this up from a Little Free Library - the paperback cover is beautiful, it actually shimmers. I'm really a digital girl though, so I ended up getting the audiobook and kindle copy from the library. It wasn't a long wait. 

This is one that I think I would have enjoyed a little more in my younger years, when I was reading (not listening). Not to say the audio wasn't good, it was. There are three MCs, and even though it was all 3rd person (past tense) there were three different narrators, which I appreciated. It helped keep Loulie, Mazen and Aisha more distinct, having three different voices for them. Each chapter had a header to announce the POV ... these names were included in the Kindle Table of Contents, but not in the audio (and alas, the physical book doesn't even have a TOC page). In addition to the chapters from our three MCs, there were three stories .... The Tale of the Jinn, The Tale of Amir and the Lamp, and The Tale of the Queen of the Dunes.  70 chapters (plus the three tales). 

While in the audio, I referred to the Kindle copy several times, double checking words, doing a quick re-read when I got a little confused. Set in this foreign land, and with the fantasy feel, there were a lot of names and words I wasn't familiar with, and the writing itself was more complex. Diawan, souk, akhi, concupiscence, riposte, ululated, palimpsest, hammam, ifrit, shinsha ... I've actually read about the Jinn in a few reads already. There was the Aladdin imagery (even the phrase "a whole new world" which I wondered if that was just chance or an Easter Egg drop to the Disney film) which I'm familiar with, and the 1001 Arabian Nights, which I'm not. 

I finished the book ... I never felt like I really got pulled in, enough to get emotional when there was a death or hardships. In fact, to that point SPOILER

there were too many THEY ARE DEAD! Oh, actually, let's bring them back to life! Not really dead, not really gone.

When it ended, I was caught off guard - cliffhanger,  set up for the sequel ... which I don't think I'm invested enough in to read. As mentioned above ... I actually think back when I was younger, when I didn't have thousands of books waiting at my fingertips, when I wasn't hurrying through books as quickly (listening while doing other things), I think I WOULD have really fallen more for this world and this story. 

Quite a few of the words I notice - cerulean, dais, cacophony, snuck, chaos, plethora, ululation, purloined, susurration, brusquely, route (pronounced "rowt" by the Loulie narrator). ProFanity x 2.  Also, that narrator spoke songs, there were a few. 

This has a YA tag ... it didn't really feel YA to me. The characters seemed a bit older, although I can't recall if we were given exact ages. The complexity, and while nothing super sexually explicit, there was some (I had to look up the meaning of concupiscence ...  means strong sexual desire or lust.