Yay or Nay?: The Wrath and The Dawn (Novel)

Apologies for the late update! It’s been a busy week and I’ve been catching up on a lot of work so finishing this review slipped my mind and before I knew it I was watching HGTV on Thursday night forgetting my review was supposed to go live in 4 hours. But I caught the ball (a day late) and here it is. 

So once upon a time I reviewed a little piece of fiction called “A Thousand Nights” which you can read here, and I hated it. It was an Arabian Nights retelling that I was so excited to read but then was disappointed to find out that it got published. And up until this point I thought there was no good Arabian Nights retellings out there. 

UNTIL NOW. 

This novel though: The Wrath and The Dawn by Renee Ahdieh is EXACTLY the type of novel I wanted A Thousand Nights to be. It’s fantastical, colourful, and most importantly, it’s given a dimension to the character of Shahrzad or Scheherazade (as the original story calls her-- and I apologize if I mispelled that) that is creative, interesting, and very engaging. And it’s surprising to me since it’s such an underestimated book that seems to have fallen under the radar. 

The Story 

As GoodReads puts it: 

In a land ruled by a murderous boy-king, each dawn brings heartache to a new family. Khalid, the eighteen-year-old Caliph of Khorasan, is a monster. Each night he takes a new bride only to have a silk cord wrapped around her throat come morning. When sixteen-year-old Shahrzad's dearest friend falls victim to Khalid, Shahrzad vows vengeance and volunteers to be his next bride. Shahrzad is determined not only to stay alive, but to end the caliph's reign of terror once and for all.

Night after night, Shahrzad beguiles Khalid, weaving stories that enchant, ensuring her survival, though she knows each dawn could be her last. But something she never expected begins to happen: Khalid is nothing like what she'd imagined him to be. This monster is a boy with a tormented heart. Incredibly, Shahrzad finds herself falling in love. How is this possible? It's an unforgivable betrayal. Still, Shahrzad has come to understand all is not as it seems in this palace of marble and stone. She resolves to uncover whatever secrets lurk and, despite her love, be ready to take Khalid's life as retribution for the many lives he's stolen. Can their love survive this world of stories and secrets?

This story doesn’t immediately start out as a story of love. Of course it does come that way, but its immediately a story of revenge, and the beginning of the book there is rarely an introduction, you a thrust right into the wedding of Shahrzad and Khalid, and you see her thoughts as she attempts to plan out how she will exact her revenge when the time was right. And I have to say, I loved Shahrzad from the moment I met her on the page. She’s a strong-willed, loyal, and strategic protagonist with a sense of wit and sharp tongue. Most importantly, with all these qualities combined, and taking into account that it’s a Y/A novel—  I felt Shahrzad was real and believable. 

My Thoughts 

Politics actually takes a front row seat in this novel, and describing names, places, and positions of various characters is also essential to the novel— and it wasn’t overbearing either. While there were certain aspects of rank, and parts of this world that Ahdieh built that did confuse me, it was not so big as to ruin the story for me. Coupled with this, was the aspect of character, and building two main characters, a vengeful protagonist and an unforgivable antagonist (and who is not as he seems) is difficult to do well in writing. I think these two aspects were done extraordinarily well, and kept up an aspect of conflict as well as reality throughout the story. Khalid knows his crimes, but yet, as you’ll find out, is not quite guilty of them, and Shahrzad must come to terms about this new reality she finds out about Khalid and the conflict of falling in love with her closest friend’s murderer. 

Second, the stories— my god, I didn’t think that it was possible to give the stories that Shahrzad tells a critical role both in the novel and in her relationship to Khalid— and it’s one of the reasons that they come closer together. One thing I always wondered when reading the original Arabian Nights was why stories quelled the Sultan so much. Were they truly that good? In The Wrath and the Dawn, the stories play an integral role to Khalid’s character, and to who he was in his past before taking on a ruling position. And this is SO important towards the overall development of the story and him as a character. That was exactly what I was hoping to get out of an Arabian Nights retelling. While building a colourful world befitting the fantastical environment Arabian Nights is traditionally set in, and which A Thousand Nights was good at doing— it lacked all sense of character development or seemingly awareness of it’s source material. The Wrath and the Dawn does the opposite, and takes its source material and provides a stunning new spin on it, intensifying elements that defined it but were more or less not explained, still retaining elements of the old story, as well as putting a new spin on it, and creating a totally new tale that compliments it rather than takes away from it. And, spoilers— there’s a sequel! And you bet I’ll be reading it when I get a chance. 

One thing I did feel the story didn’t do as greatly though— relating to the stories of Arabian Nights (the source material), and the overall structure of the novel was that the stories began to take a backseat as the story progressed. I understand why that needed to happen, but, I feel it should’ve been focused on a little more. That, and the story progressed so quickly that I felt some aspects of the narrative could’ve been more fleshed out. There were some points in the story that progressed so quickly I had to reread just to make sure I didn’t skip it— because there were some critical plot points in them that just waved as they passed me by. I suppose that’s why the sequel exists, but this is a story that is good enough that it could afford to take a breath and slow down. I wouldn’t have minded. 

My Rating

So! With that in mind, I would give this a buy or a borrow! You’ll enjoy the mystery, the characters, and the large world it creates! 

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (4 Stars)

Check it out!

~Meghan