Djinn City

by Saad Z. Hossain

From the author of the cult classic Escape from Baghdad!, comes one of The Guardian's Best Fantasy Books of the Year
Indelbed is a lonely kid living in a crumbling mansion in the super dense, super chaotic third world capital Of Bangladesh. His father, Dr. Kaikobad, is the black sheep of their clan, the once illustrious Khan Rahman family. A drunken loutish widower, he refuses to allow Indelbed go to school, and the only thing Indelbed knows about his mother is the official cause of her early demise: "Death by Indelbed."



But When Dr. Kaikobad falls into a supernatural coma, Indelbed and his older cousin, the wise-cracking slacker Rais, learn that Indelbed's dad was in fact a magician-and a trusted emissary to the djinn world. And the Djinns, as it turns out, are displeased. A "hunt" has been announced, and ten year-old Indelbed is the prey. Still reeling from the fact that genies actually exist, Indelbed finds himself on the run. Soon, the boys are at the center of a great Diinn controversy, one tied to the continuing fallout from an ancient war, with ramifications for the future of life as we know it.


Saad Z. Hosscin updates the supernatural creatures Of Arabian mythology-a superior but by no means perfect species pushed to the brink by the staggering ineptitude of the human race. Djinn City is a darkly comedic fanlasy adventure, and a stirring follow-up to Hossain's 2015 novel Escape from Baghdad!, which NPR called "a hilarious and searing indictment of the project we euphemistically call 'nation-building.'"

• ISBN13: 9789386021137
• Publish Date: 30 December 2017 (first published 24 October 2017)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: IN
• Imprint: Aleph Book Company
• Pages: 456
• Language: English

Reviews

[Heather]

This book is long.  This book is dense.  Try to just breezily rush through this and you will miss things.  This book is also smart and sarcastic and snarky and everything else I love.

Indelbed is adorable.  He's from the embarrassing part of a prominent family.  He's pretty much being ignored by his alcoholic father who is in turn ignored by the extended family.  He's just going about his life the best he can hoping that maybe someday one of his aunts will notice that things are really not ok in his life when he gets kidnapped by a djinn.

From here there are three stories taking place.

1. Indelbed is thrown in a murder pit where he lives with a djinn prisoner for 10 years while they plot an ambitious escape.


2. Indelbed's father is in a coma and his spirit is watching the history of an epic battle through the memories of the people who were there.


3. Indelbed's aunt Juny and cousin Rais find out that djinn are real and set out to figure out what happened to Indelbed.

I liked storylines 3 and 1 the best.  Along the way there are wyrms that the prisoners tame in hopes that one will grow into a dragon to help them escape.  There are also djinn airships and submarines and hidden bases in the sky.  Djinns don't physically fight amongst themselves any more.  Now they engage in legal wrangling that can go on for decades.  Breach of contract is their greatest sin.

It is a very hard book to describe.  It is one where the pleasure is in the journey, not the destination.  In fact, I'm quite annoyed by the end of this book.  Mostly I'm annoyed by the lack of ending of this book.  Obviously this is set up to have a sequel because the book just stops.  Storyline 3 turns in a whole new direction about to have an adventure in the last pages.  It isn't even a cliffhanger.  It is a "Hey, let's go look at this new thing......" and we're out of pages.  The other two stories are likewise incomplete.  I actually kept looking for more pages of book because it was just, "Now we are done."This review was originally posted on Based On A True Story