The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn was a hauntingly beautiful speculative fiction short story. It's not a romance, although it does include two love stories; one has a HEA, and one does not. It starts with Salman Ali Zaidi, a young boy in America, whose grandfather tells him stories of the pauper princess he knew during his youth in Lahore, Pakistan. A descendant of thelast Mughal Emperor, Zeenat Begum ran a small tea stall. She told people that a jinn had protected her royal ancestors, and now watched over her from the Eucalyptus tree that shaded her little stall. After Sal grows up, he discovers evidence in his deceased grandfather's possessions that his family have a much greater link to the Mughal princess than his grandfather ever let on. He travels to Pakistan for the first time to investigate and is caught up in the same eternal and otherworldly mystery his grandfather had stumbled upon half a century before. The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn drew in ontology of the creation of human and jinn, and philoshopy about myth and history. From reading Goodreads reviews, I gather the philosophy was a turn-off for some people, but as Sal's grandfather told him as a boy, "all good stories leave questions". Just as with much speculative fiction, especially the shorter formats, I don't feel like one is meant to get bogged down in the hows and the whys of it all. I certainly felt like everything was explained, in a lyrical way that befitted the story, and that nothing got overly complicated, unless you were trying to connect every dot. And this was the thing - the reader couldn't connect every dot, because Sal didn't even have that ability, and he was the narrator. Sal's voice - and the writing in general - was so lyrical and strong, and Malik has woven so many different things into such a short story and made them fit together seamlessly. It shouldn't have worked, but it does. However, if I was to critique the story for anything - and it's a such a very small thing, hardly worth bringing up - it would be the story's reliance on a unbroken male line for five generations, given that the whole story hinged on a Mughal princess.
"I know you think you've heard this story before, but you're wrong. Some would have it that this story begins with a virtuous virgin, a young woman of honesty and integrity sucker punched by cruel fortune and forced to sleep among the cinders while her moral inferiors lived the which was meant to be hers. Bullshit. This is no fairytale."
That's the first paragraph of Ember by Bettie Sharpe, and it's certainly not the last time the heroine, Ember, breaks the fourth wall to warn the reader not to glorify her. For all it has the same first-person narration and fantastic setting as the fairytale retellings of my childhood, it's no starry-eyed Ella Enchanted. In fact, it's completely different from anything I've ever read before. The main character, Ember, is a witch. Not a sanitised bubbles-and-rainbows type of witch (I'm looking at you, Glinda the Good), but a legitimate witch, the kind that makes blood sacrifices and gets her revenge on those who've wronged her. Her love interest is equally unconventional. At birth, Prince Adrian Juste was blessed with the universal regard of his subjects; men respect him, women want him, and neither can deny him anything. As much as he craves a life where he's not surrounded by sycophants, he's not above using his curse to get what he wants. And he wants Ember, the one woman who isn't affected by his unnatural charm. Ember is unburdened by conventional morality, and it makes her an unpredictable and memorable character. As a snarky anti-heroine, she's eminently relatable. Sharpe treads the tightrope between amorality and likability well, keeping the reader onside through Ember's loyalty to her step-mother and -sisters. In this adaptation, Ember's step-family are whores, forced to escape their homeland and make a new life with Ember and her father. Once again, Sharpe deals with this sensitively, and provides the reader with a raft of great secondary characters at the same time. One of the things I really loved about this novel was that all of its characters were well-developed, independent of gendered stereotypes. There was no cookie-cutter hero, or same-same good-girl heroine; each and every character was unique and interesting. This in-depth characterisation was countered by a realtively simple plot, but this too was well-executed. Potenital readers should be aware that there are a few more swearwords thrown around than usual. I didn't feel like they were gratuitous - Ember's character wouldn't have been half as bad-ass without them, that's for sure - but we each have differing levels of tolerance for these things. Ditto the level of sexuality. While Ember doesn't have any more sex scenes than your average romance novel, Ember and those around her are all overtly sexual beings. Frankly, it would have been weird if this hadn't been the case, given her stepfamily's profession and the Prince's curse! If I had to critique one thing about Ember, it would be that it was sometimes scarce on details. This occasionally drew me out of the narrative, as I'd have to flick back a page or two to remember where a particular conversation was taking place or some other such thing that had been mentioned, but not reinforced through detailed description. However, I don't feel like this came at the expense of the characterisation or plot, and it didn't really detract from my enjoyment of the book. Ember was a great read and, at the moment, it's $0.79 on kindle. THAT'S SEVENTY-NINE CENTS, GUYS. You can't even buy a Ghost Drop for 79 cents these days. And unlike many cheap reads on Kindle, there's not a spelling or formatting mistake in sight, in addition to a good plot and excellent characterisation. It's the mythical needle in a haystack, the hen's tooth, the black cat in the coal cellar. I'm getting overly poetic now so I'll stop, but if it sounds like your thing, go get it!
4 stars It is a truth universally acknowledged that a book in possession of a Princess Bride reference within the first two sentences is going to be an excellent read. And Suleikha Snyder's Opening Act starts strong with a band called 'The Brute Squad' . For those of you who have forgotten the line that comes from, or (heaven forbid) haven't seen the movie, here's a little reminder:
But back to Opening Act. Journalist Saroj Shah has been in love with her friend, Adam Harper - guitar player of the aforementioned band - for years. Adam's been burying his head in the sand for just as long. But when Adam finally wakes up and decides he wants her too, Saroj isn't sure he's serious. After all:
He was big, doofy all-American Adam. She was Saroj "where are the twenty gold wedding sarees" Shah...No one looked at the two of them and thought, Yes, they should be together. That makes sense.
Most of the novel's conflict is internal, stemming from the hero and heroine's beliefs about themselves and others. When I first finished the book, I felt vaguely disappointed with this. I kept thinking there would be some big denouement, but there never was and then suddenly it was over. When I sat down to write this review, it was beccause I needed to vent about reaching the end before I was mentally prepared for it. But this is not Snyder's fault; it often happens when I read books on Kindle. The little percentage in the bottom right corner misleads me because it often includes 10%-20% samples of other titles. Anyway, once I got over my trauma at being abruptly ripped out of bookland, I re-evaluted and realised that Opening Act was actually a really wonderful novella. Too often authors try to squeeze too much into a novella, or they use the format to avoid characterisation all together. Sometimes, they manage both simultaneously. But Snyder developed her characters and their attitudes well (I especially like the sidekick, Johnny Ray). To have introduced an external conflict late in the piece would have spoiled the burgeoning relationship between Adam and Saroj, and overshadow Saroj's self-realisation, in which she de-colonised her mind to the point where she went "damn straight, I'm good enough for Adam and stuff what anyone else thinks". (That's not a direct quote, guys, I promise. Snyder's writing is heaps better than that. See actual quote above about doofiness and sarees.) So, overall, I really liked Opening Act, and I probably would have loved it if I'd had a better conception of its length and content starting out. But I do feel a bit weird about making it one of my #WNDB reads (or having them at all). I've been reading the author's blog and she's understandably disillusioned by white people hijacking conversations that should be for POC. I would hate to think that, in trying to broaden my horizons, I am being like those men who appear in the comments section of anything ever written about feminism. Not the 'what about teh menz' ones, but the ones that think that my manslpaining feminism and talking over other people's lived experience, they are actually helping the cause. It usually ends up with something like this:
“I’ve read one author of color, so I’m done now” is a real thing. We feel it when we put books out there, when we pitch to editors and agents...Can you imagine saying, “Well, I read Sarah MacLean, so I’m full up. I don’t need to read Tessa Dare or Lisa Kleypas or Nora Roberts!”?"
My first thought on reading this was 'what would I do if I had to choose Sarah MacLean or Tessa Dare?' and it made me feel a bit panicky. Back on topic, maybe fetishising diversity and patting ourselves on the back for reading something different isn't the best way to go about things. But, then, maybe you can only fight fire with fire. So, after talking that through and resolving absolutely nothing, I leave you with these two tweets to think about:
