The Wrath and The Dawn

                                          

Title: The Wrath and the Dawn

Author: Renee Adieh

Publisher: Putnam

How I Found It: I saw it all over both Twitter and Tumblr, specifically from my friend Lisa.

Synopsis: Every dawn brings horror to a different family in a land ruled by a killer. Khalid, the eighteen-year-old Caliph of Khorasan, takes a new bride each night only to have her executed at sunrise. So it is a suspicious surprise when sixteen-year-old Shahrzad volunteers to marry Khalid. But she does so with a clever plan to stay alive and exact revenge on the Caliph for the murder of her best friend and countless other girls. Shazi’s wit and will, indeed, get her through to the dawn that no others have seen, but with a catch . . . she’s falling in love with the very boy who killed her dearest friend.

She discovers that the murderous boy-king is not all that he seems and neither are the deaths of so many girls. Shazi is determined to uncover the reason for the murders and to break the cycle once and for all.

Rating: I’m not going to give this book a numerical rating because that wouldn’t properly tell you my feelings about this book.

Review: I’ll admit that I had a hard time reading this book when I first started. I found it difficult to keep my attention on it, partially because I was in school and I had a stack of other new books I wanted to read just as much. I’d also been reading a lot of contemporary fiction and wasn’t quite in the mindset to really appreciate this book. I knew I wanted to review The Wrath and the Dawn and so I put it down until I could give it my full concentration.

Part of the problem is that I didn’t read much of the synopsis as I didn’t want too much to be given away to me before I read the book and so all the information I had was from things I’d seen on the internet. If you find yourself a bit lost like I was, just keep going. Reading this book is worth any initial confusion you may have.

Once I got into the book, I tore through it in two days by reading in the car and during study breaks. Any chance I had, I immediately went to The Wrath and the Dawn. I fell in love with Sharzad and I didn’t want the book to end because that would mean leaving Shazi. I also fell in love with Khorasan and the beautiful way Renee Adieh described it. The pacing was perfect and as I got to the end, I couldn’t put it down. I didn’t realize there was going to be a sequel and so I was trying to soak up every last drop of Khorasan I could.

I can’t wait for The Rose and the Dagger, Renee Aideh’s follow-up to her brilliant debut.