The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi

Our Review

"For this scribe has read a great many of these accounts and taken away another lesson: that to be a woman is to have your story misremembered. Discarded. Twisted."

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi is an incredible book. I loved City of Brass so I knew I was likely to enjoy this book too, but I had forgotten quite how magical Chakraborty's writing style is. I felt like I lived every moment of this book alongside Amina and her friends. 

"Yes! That captain Amina al-Sirafi. The smuggler, the pirate. The blasphemer that men of letters acuse of serving up human hearts for her sea-beast husband,and the sorceress, for she must be a sorceress, because no female could sail a ship so deftly without the use of forbidden magics. Whose appearance somehow both beguiles and repulses. Traders along our fair isles warn against speaking her name as though she is a djinn that might be summoned as such - though, strangely, they have little compunction when it comes to spreading vicious rumours about her body and her sexuality: these things that men obsess over when they have what they desire and desire what they cannot possess."

Amina was an infamous and well-known pirate until the death of one of her crew lead her to retire out of guilt. Amina now lives with her daughter and her mother in a ramshackle house with a leak in the roof. If she sometimes longs for her old life then those feelings are pushed aside for the sake of her daughter's safety. Then one day a rich old lady offers her a large some of money to search for missing granddaughter, enough money that she and her daughter need never worry about money again. Amina is swayed to return to life at sea one more time and magical adventures follow. 

It was incredibly refreshing to read a story where become a wife or mother is not the end of the story.

"A mother if you believe it! Ah yes, a certain degree of rebelliousness if expected from youth. It is why we have stories of treasure-seeking princesses and warrior women that end with the occasional happiness. But they are expected to end - with the boy, the prince, the sailor, the adventurer. The man that will take her maidenhood, grant her children, make her a wife. The man who defines her. He may continue his epic - he may indeed take new wives and make new children! - but women's stories are expected to dissolve into a fog of domesticity...if they're told at all. 

Amina's story did not end. Verily, no woman's story does."

I love that this story is set in a predominantly muslim country and that Amina's religion plays such a large part in her character and influences - in particular guilt. 

The Adventures of Amina al-Sarafi is a wholly unique book and I hope to hear more from this chracter.

Our Final Rating...

7 Weeks Ago