The Wrath and the Dawn by Renee Ahdieh
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

“She was a dangerous, dangerous girl. A plague. A Mountain of Adamant who tore the iron from ships, sinking them to their watery graves without a second thought. With a mere smile and a wrinkle of her nose.”

 I must warn you that these last weeks I've had the worst reading slump and so it's possible that my opinion on this book was affected by it, still I believe that even if I hadn't had such experience my opinion on it wouldn't have been very different. That said, I just thought that The Warth and the Dawn wasn't all that great.

“Some things exist in our lives for but a brief moment. And we must let them go on to light another sky.”

 This book, as you might already know, is a retelling of One Thousand and One Nights. As far as retelling go I've always thought the most interesting thing about them is how the author manages to entwine parts from the original story with clever twists of his or her own invention. And it seemed to me, that The Wrath and the Dawn had very little of that as the story is basically the same. There is a king that marries a different girl every day, and each dawn the new queen dies by his command, however when the newest queen begins to tell him stories night after night, the king, entralled by her storytelling allows her to live in order for her to finish her tales.

 The only differences I could find were the Kalid's motives behind the death of his wives and Shahrzad own reason to marry the boy. Other than that there are no new additions, it's basically the same story but devoid of the richness of the original book. The characters seemed a bit watered-down and the description of the enviroment a bit plain, I'm not saying that it didn't have it's moments because it did, for example there were parts of the dialogue between Kalid and Shahrzad that were frankly brilliant but besides that I don't think I would ever choose this book over the source material, maybe it just wasn't for me. I know it has fairly good reviews and some people like it very much but I think that compared to other brilliant retellings out there it's just not that good.

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