"Are not all mothers capable of being monsters when it comes to their children?"

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NetGalley, thank you thank you THANK YOU for sending me a copy of what is probably my favorite book of 2023! Where do I even begin to describe how much I am obsessed with this book?

Within a few pages I KNEW that this book was going to become a new instant fave. Chakraborty has a gift for storytelling that weaves together adventure, history, fantastical elements, layered characters, potent themes, and excellent banter! When you find a book that you equally cannot put down and never want it to end, you know you've found your latest book obsession. And for me, that was The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi.

The character of Amina al-Sirafi is an absolute breath of fresh air, and I YEARN for more characters like her in the stories I read. Amina is strong and fierce and FUN! She's older in age (but not old), she's a mother who will do anything to protect her daughter, she's a pirate, and she's unabashedly herself. She's an icon, she's a legend, she is the MOMENT, and 2023 BELONGS. TO. HER. She is, without a doubt, in my top 5 of female protagonists.

The banter and dynamics between the characters in this book...Y'ALL. This book is HILARIOUS. I loved the friendships, particularly between Amina and Dalila. The two of them together are a force to be reckoned with and they feed off each other so well.

One last major highlight of this book were the excerpts, missives, and tales. These added so much to the world building, lore, and history. Sometimes when books have these extras woven into the story, they can be distracting, but not with this book. In my opinion, it only elevated an already amazing story that much more.

INFINITY out of 5 stars! If you haven't read this book yet, go read it! And while you're at it, also pick up Chakraborty's Daevabad trilogy!

Usually, you know what you’re getting with a pirate story. Swordfights, rum, probably some treasure, maybe a little misogyny, and generally the sort of grizzled, damaged characters who, as the kids say, have seen some shit. This is a big part of the reason that Shannon Chakraborty’s The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi feels like a breath of fresh air: It’s a story that pushes back against everything these kinds of tales are known for. A delightfully wry and self-aware romp, this first installment in a new fantasy series from the critically acclaimed author of the Daevabad trilogy is, more than anything else, simply fun.

A swashbuckling adventure with genuine stakes and richly developed oddball characters whose found family of misfits vibe is endlessly charming, the novel’s brisk pace and dry self-deprecating narrative style (the story is framed as Amina recounting—and commenting on—her life story for a scribe) help the pages fly by, and Chakraborty’s detailed, immersive worldbuilding makes the various villages and island of her medieval Islamic world sing with life. But what truly makes The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi stand out is its heroine.

In fantasy tales like this, the story’s central figure is almost always a young woman on some sort of journey of self-discovery, who grows into the person she’s meant to become along the way. Chakraborty’s Amina, in contrast, is a middle-aged mother who has lived an entire life before this book’s title page—surviving dangers, exploring her beliefs, and having her flaws made all too plain to her. She has a checkered past, a young daughter she adores, a bum knee, and a laundry list of things she’d do differently if given the chance. This isn’t the beginning of her story.

Throughout this novel, Amina is still living with the consequences of the choices she made when she was younger and felt untouchable. Her rededication to her Muslim faith is in large part about atonement and penance for the choices she made them. Her relationships with her crew are steeped in shared history and mistakes. Her reputation may seem fantastical, but it’s one she came by honestly and she carries the emotional and physical scars to prove it. It’s a perspective and a character type we see very infrequently in this genre, which is why Amina feels like a revelation from the book’s first pages.

Easily a five-star read for me, this book was absolutely captivating with its richly detailed world-building, a lively cast of characters, and exciting plot. From the very first page, I was drawn into Amina's world and taken on an immersive journey around the Indian Ocean during the 12th century. Amina herself is a wonderful protagonist, with a fierce determination and a relatable vulnerability that makes her easy to root for.

The ride-or-die camaraderie between Amina and her old crew is one of my favorite aspects of the storytelling. The dynamic among the old friends is spot on and very entertaining, especially when they find trouble and have to get themselves out of it. Honestly, this whole crew had me in stitches, especially Raksh who is just ridiculous and delightful throughout.

I also loved how many different pirate adventure tropes the author managed to squeeze into this story. We have quests, a ship heist, a prison break, sea monsters, clashes with other pirate crews and more. The risky, high-stakes nature of each challenge kept me reading well past my bedtime, and I really enjoyed seeing how Amina and her crew navigated the various obstacles.

Lastly, this book was everything I had hoped for and I'm just a tiny bit obsessed with it. I rarely collect multiple editions of the same book, but this one was so good, I didn't mind sacrificing some extra shelf space for an extra special edition copy. If you enjoy historical fantasies, exotic locales, and strong female protagonists, this is likely to be a new favorite!

Thank you for the ARC! This review has been cross-posted on Goodreads and Instagram.

I found the writing style interfered with my ability to take in the story. I tried to pick it up a few times and ultimately decided it wasn't for me. Disappointing because I love this author's other work.

After picking up this book several times, I find that the pacing makes the story rather droll and dry. in just the first 12%, there are so many asides that don't move the story forward. Many of the conversations last a lot longer than they needed to be and felt repetitive at times. I'm not going to be able to finish this one.

This was such an entertaining adventure from beginning to end. The Adventures of Amina a-Sirafi is a swash-buckling historical fantasy. I loved the themes of found family, dark magic, and demon husbands! This was less serious than the Daevabad trilogy, but I didn't mind because it was so much fun. The worldbuilding was phenomenal, and the character dynamics were a blast.

I thought this was fine. I really enjoyed Chakraborty's first series, but struggled to get the same enjoyment out of this. I don't think I was really engaged with it until almost the end. The pacing just felt slower; it took forever to get anywhere. I'm not sure I would read the other books in the series. The finale did offer some redemption for me, and I found myself genuinely hooked, but I'm not sure the journey there was worth it.

This was one of my most anticipated releases! After reading the Daevabad series, I was so excited to start another adventure by Shannon Chakraborty! I really enjoyed this one!

Although slightly slow to start, once this book picks up, it doesn’t stop! It was incredibly compelling and fast paced! I loved the world building and the concept of different realms, it was fascinating! Also, who doesn’t love a good pirate story?!

The characters were also phenomenal! It centered around a group of older adults being badass pirates! They were written with such a beautiful balance of wisdom and youthful longing for adventure. So refreshing to read about older adults living out their adventurous dreams!

If you enjoy fantasy seafaring stories, totally check this one out! I promise you won’t be disappointed!

It took me longer to get into this book than I expected which lent a hint of disappointment to my reading experience of this hyped (in general and for myself) book. In retrospect, I see how that hint of disappointment affected my enjoyment of this book that I actually really loved. Chakraborty clearly did her research and threw the reader into a rich, vibrant historical world that so many educated in most Western countries know nothing about. At the end, when the fantastical comes into play, the plot sped up and I breathed a sigh of relief with the return of the breakneck fantastical world that Chakraborty builds.

Thank you so much to the publisher and net galley for sending me a copy of this book. It is my favorite book of the entire year. I cannot explain how much this books means to me. I wish that I had a story like this when I was young.

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi is such a beautifully written fantasy. The world-building is outstanding. The story is well written with an enchanting storyline and well-developed characters that engage from start to finish. The world is atmospheric and feels real with vivid descriptions and rich imagery. I cannot get enough. Highly recommended. Be sure to check out The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi today.

This one was kind of disappointing to me. I was... bored? There was a lot of "go to a place, do a thing. Go to another place, do a thing." and that isn't my type of fantasy. I did like the cultural aspects of it. But we kept getting TOLD that she was this badass scary pirate, but I really would've liked some flashback scenes showing that she was a badass.

4.25 Stars 🏴‍☠️ -- What a swashbuckling tale! This book follows Amina, a retired pirate captain who takes a one last mission to save her family. After she gets her crew back together again, much chaos ensues: facing down a vicious villain, fighting an unearthly sea creature, and trying to track down a lost child of her former shipmate.

I think the best part of this book is either the humor and comedy at certain moments with Amina’s beloved crew OR the totally eastern centric take on pirates and their practices. Amina is a badass but she’s also willing to go to bat for her people, unapologetically. My love of the book jumped up at the end for a very specific reason and I didn’t see that fun little paradigm shift(?) of the narration coming so soon but I LOVED it and the way it walks treated. I was smiling like a fool when I read that part. The representation here is truly great and it’s such a special read! Will definitely be reading the rest.

<i>Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers Harper Voyager and Avon for the advanced e-arc. This did not affect my review in any way!</i>

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi has me talking in short, loud, exclamatory statements. It's so good! It's so much fun! I want more immediately! I would die for [insert almost any character here, really, they're all fantastic]!

I haven't read Chakraborty's previous work (yet!), so while I always hope for a book to be a new favorite, of course, I didn't have any particular expectations for Amina. I was hoping for a fun high-seas adventure with piracy and magic in a 12th century Indian Ocean setting...and I got that (boy, did I) as well as so much more. It does such a beautiful job of blending the fantastical and the completely down-to-earth (including questions of motherhood, sacrifice and balance, and what we owe to ourselves or to others), describing a rich, vibrant world populated with so many intriguing and fully-realized characters, chief among them Amina herself, bigger than life and deeply human all at once. It's a splendidly written story, as big and dramatic and fantastical as any legend, but solidly rooted in human reality.

I fell happily into this story and didn't come up for air until I reached the end, hungry for more and basically yelping incoherently at everyone I know to read this marvelous book.

Thank you to Harper Voyager for the advance review copy!

I loved this book. I haven't been into fantasy as much lately but this one was so well done I was immediately sucked in and couldn't put it down. I loved the wit and sass of the main character. I loved the friendships and how strong they were. The cast of characters is so well done and unique. The twists in the book were well done. Can't wait for book two!

Actual rating: 3.75, rounded up to 4 stars

This is a hard one for me to rate. I love Chakraborty's writing style. She fills her books with lush descriptions of landscapes, people, creatures, food, and architecture. She's adept at writing banter between characters and letting the characters exist in a world alongside the plot. However, in this one I found the first-person narration to be too casual. The informality in the tone created a weird divide for me between the stakes and how the characters were reacting to the situation around them. I think the worst perpetrator of this was Raksh. He felt so out of place to me and tonally different.

At the end of the day, I wanted to love this one more than I did, but I couldn't get over the tone nor how it dragged out. The twist at the end was surprising, but wasn't one that I felt made sense in the context of how the rest of the book was written. There were moments where it could have been revealed earlier and might have flowed better.

Adventurous, exciting, and chaotic in the best ways, this is a story of lady pirates on the high seas that I never knew I needed. Chakraborty's worldbuilding is impeccable, the level of detail and captivating backstories were a real treat, and this was just an absolutely fun book to read. It reminded me a lot of the kinds of books I used to love as when I was younger, the kind that make you remember why you fell in love with reading.

What a fun romp!! The kind of book I've been missing, even if I didn't realize it til after I'd finished reading.

This story is full of wily characters who never run out of clever quips, and surprise you with their kindness and care. Aka the perfect group to go treasure-seeking across the seas! I love a good pirate book, and it was so fun to get a glimpse of other pirate communities (besides our main group, of course). Chakraborty knows how to write charming, delightful rascals, so it was always a delight to turn the page and see what new creature might appear next.

Such a vibrant group of characters is deserving of an equally imaginative story, and Chakraborty delivers! While it did take me a bit to get into the story, once the plot picked up, I was hooked. Each chapter drew me forward, and by the end, I was rushing to turn pages and learn what would happen next. I loved the in-between chapters that gave context, through legends and character's histories—even if they technically took me away from the main plot, I was always equally intrigued by whatever tangent I was briefly led down. I also love that this story was set up as a scribe writing down a story as it was told. I think it was a great way to get to know Amina through how she speaks, and get a glimpse of the mystery scribe's personality as well.

This wasn't quite a five star read for me, but I'm hopeful for the subsequent books in the series to knock my socks off! I can't wait to adventure with the Amina and her crew again.

https://bookandfilmglobe.com/fiction/the-adventures-of-amina-al-sirafi/



Shannon Chakraborty is famous for writing the sweeping Islam-infused science fantasy epic, The Daevabad Trilogy. However, her new book The Adventures Of Amina Al-Sirafi is speculative fiction rather than science fiction, exploring the Indian Ocean in the first millennium rather than exploring space in the third. She barely misses a beat, though, with a fantastically fun modern revisiting of the medieval explorers tales, in a novel for which they could have coined the word “swashbuckling”.

A few years after and a few miles south of the Crusades, circumstances force legendary pirate Amina Al-Sirafi out of retirement to find the grandchild of a rich old lady.

Amina is a retired pirate with tales told about her that are almost as tall as she is. Used to living in anonymity and enjoying her peace with her daughter, she finds herself set upon by a wealthy mother of a former friend who demands her services in recovering a kidnapped girl. Though she hesitates in accepting, Amina knows deep down that she still longs for adventure and agrees to take this one last job. But nothing is quite as it seems, and the more that Amina learns about this task, the more she finds that this conflict goes deeper and is more dangerous than she could have imagined.

I loved the Daevabad Trilogy by this author, so I jumped at the chance to read her new work. However, this one just wasn’t as enjoyable for me. Something I both enjoyed and disliked about it was that it was set up as Amina telling her story to a scribe. I enjoyed this in that it felt more like traditional Islamic histories that I’ve read, especially the shorter chapters when the scribe jumps in with some background information and tales. But I disliked how much it slowed down the primary plot and how it took away from any tension or suspense I might have felt at the difficult situations Amina encountered. This and the excessive details that were incorporated throughout led to the work feeling quite dense with minimal forward motion of the plot for much of the book.

I did enjoy how smoothly the author incorporated positive Islamic and gender representation in this work. It was well done and added much to the characters. But it seemed to be lacking when it came to Amina and her piracy. We’re told time and time again what a threatening and amazing pirate she is, but we rarely see that in action during the book. I enjoyed that Amina was a middle-aged protagonist, and that she was written to be complex with interesting flaws and motivations. But the villain did not receive the same treatment – he was painfully cliché and uninteresting and felt like the villain from an early 1990s treasure-hunting film that I can’t remember the name of. The remaining secondary characters were decent, but were buried under so much exposition that it was difficult to connect to them.

I’m massively disappointed that I couldn’t enjoy this one more. I’ll still continue the series because I loved the first trilogy so much, but I can’t recommend this book the same way I would the others. My thanks to NetGalley and Avon and Harper Voyager for allowing me to read this work. All thoughts and opinions expressed in this review are my own.