Wow! Just one more chapter…

As a child, I loved the Tales of the Arabian Nights, of djinns and wizards, clever thieves and maidens-in-peril. The Parsina Saga has that same feel of exotic landscapes and ordinary people caught up in the clash between ancient good vs. evil. I could smell the spices and feel their exhaustion as they stumbled through desert heat, cheered for the characters who jumped right off the page, and found myself staying up late into the night to read 'just one more chapter' like Sheherezade's mad sultan.

What was most interesting about this series is the fact it's not your same old boring re-hash of Lord of the Rings (which, let's face it, while we all love it, does every … single … epic fantasy series really need to be set in a medieval world?) I found myself running to the computer to google exotic words such as caravansary which, while I understood perfectly in context of the story was a camel-stable, I just -had- to find out if such a thing existed in real life (they did). Of course then I fell down the Wikipedia rabbit hole to learn about djinns and the ancient caravan routes. Some of the ruins of these caravan-cities were beautiful (google Qalaat al-Madiq). After reading this series, I could picture what they must have looked like in their heyday.

While the length and worldbuilding in this series was excellent for a hard-core epic fantasy doorstopper fan like me, I would feel very comfortable giving these books to my teenage daughters to read. Fingers crossed: maybe THEY will fall down the Wikipedia rabbit hole as well. There is a nice blend of characters of different ages, genders, backgrounds and personalities that there is something for everybody. I think I learned more about the history and geography of the Middle East than in two semesters of World History classes.

My only criticism is the first chapter starts out with an 'old style' history of the city from an omniscient narrator. I'm an action-oriented reader, so I was a lot happier once I got into the head of the characters and started seeing the city through their eyes. Once there, I was absolutely hooked through the next 1,000+ pages of epic goodness. ( )