This was such an unexpected gem for me! I flew through the pages, and to be honest, I don't even know if I can fully explain why? I mean, I'll try though!
- •The Crusades and Genghis Khan and that whole time period are horrible and also fascinating as hell. I mean, this book is not for the squeamish, but it also is pretty accurate from everything I have read about the era. In fact, I think the author does a good job of presenting the absolute horror without being unnecessarily gory, if that helps. But make no mistake, it was a gory time in history, so.
- •I love these three main characters so, so much. You have Elaine, the princess of Tripoli, who is kind of over the patriarchy. Conrad is her would-be husband and prince of Antioch who, at the start, I was hoping got stabbed. Rashid is the assassin, who is from a small, hidden Muslim community who has tasked him with killing Elaine. And I won't lie, I was scared because ummm are we sure we want to portray it that way? But it wasn't. At all. Rashid is arguably the best of them, and absolutely the most open-minded. The thing I loved about the characters is that they each underwent so, so much growth, and all had flaws, and a blind spot when it came to judging another group of people.
- •Elaine was a feminist before it had a name. She was sick of being treated like property, and girl, preach. She basically set off to find Rashid knowing she could die, but figuring it was better than being forced to marry Conrad.
- •So. Much. Adventure. They headed off on a quest through... well look I am not even 100% sure how far, but it seemed like a long distance. And through some pretty rough territory- both geographically and politically. And I adore a journey of survival and such, so this was a big draw for me.
- •The trio formed an incredible bond. It was interesting to see them morph from bitter adversaries to... well, you'll have to read it for yourself to see how it goes down, but it was really great. I will say, that they start to begrudgingly respect each other fairly on, so you'll just have to find out what happens after that!
My only real issue was at about maybe 60% in, things started to feel a little redundant for about a quarter of the book. I just didn't feel the same draw to keep reading that I did during the first part (or the last bit, where things picked up again). So that was my only real negative, and I adored how the book ended. From what I can tell, this was a standalone and it wrapped up thusly. The author's note in the back gives a lot of background on the historical stuff, and it's very clear that a lot of research went into it!
Bottom Line: Such great character development and an incredibly exciting world made me eager to keep reading!