Rebel of the Sands by Alwyn Hamilton (Review)

Hello Again!

Welcome back to my second book review. For my next review, I chose a novel that has been sitting on my shelves for months. I decided to give this book a chance because I had enjoyed the Middle Eastern setting in The Wrath and the Dawn series and saw it was becoming a more popular sub-genre of the YA Fantasy genre. What really drew me to this book was the cover. It looked as if the story was going to include some element of magic which I found to be interesting. Read below to see what I thought of this novel. Enjoy!

Synopsis

"Mortals rule the desert nation of Miraji, but mythical beasts still roam the wild and remote areas, and rumor has it that somewhere, djinn still perform their magic. For humans, it’s an unforgiving place, especially if you’re poor, orphaned, or female. Amani Al’Hiza is all three. She’s a gifted gunslinger with perfect aim, but she can’t shoot her way out of Dustwalk, the back-country town where she’s destined to wind up wed or dead. Then she meets Jin, a rakish foreigner, in a shooting contest, and sees him as the perfect escape route. But though she’s spent years dreaming of leaving Dustwalk, she never imagined she’d gallop away on mythical horse—or that it would take a foreign fugitive to show her the heart of the desert she thought she knew."

-Barnes and Noble.com

Review

I wanted to start out with some positives. One of the things I enjoyed from the novel was the witty banter between the main characters. This was one of the better written aspects of the novel and made their relationship seem like it had a trajectory. Although I believe the novel wasn't well written, I do have to give the author praise for taking the initiative to write a story in this Middle Eastern sub- genre. It was unique and different from something I would normally read.

That being said, I had quite a few problems with this books the worst of which was the pacing of the story. It was very uneven, the beginning was very slow and then at about page 200 the action sped up to hyper speed and was far too fast to understand what was going on. After I finished the novel, it felt like the entire story was one long exposition that never reached its climax.

Another issue I had was the author's use of very little detail which caused the reader to be in a constant state of mild confusion. An example is the constant stream of names and places for things which were not given any context, which made the story quite hard to follow (see pacing above). The author took liberties with the story, assuming the reader has information that hasn't been said or written in the book and then the book ends almost mid battle scene like the author couldn't think of anything else to write.

Another thing I noticed was that the story flitted back and forth between genres. At times it seemed like a post- apocalyptic novel (due to the weaponry) and then at times it seemed like the story was set in another world. Overall, the story had good bones but lacked the creative spark that makes stories great. It felt like it was missing something but I couldn't quite put my finger on what.

Conclusion