For some reason, I can’t name many SWANA-set fantasy books written by SWANA authors- especially in the adult category. I have no doubt that they exist, but they simply do not possess the same word-of-mouth hype that really sells books. I don’t know how this happened. I’m sure a lot of this has to do with the spaces I occupy online, and where I get my book recommendations from, but the kicker is that I make an active effort to seek out these sorts of titles. That’s how I found The Stardust Thief. I am Persian, fantasy is my favorite genre by far, and I am well aware of the genre’s rocky history of stealing Asian aesthetics to pad their worldbuilding with little respect for the culture they’re appropriating from.
So, when I find a book that fits into the category of Own Voices, SWANA-inspired fantasy, I get tentatively excited. Excited, because this could be it, but tentatively so because I do not want to count my chickens before they hatch. My chickens rarely hatch.
The Stardust Thief by Chelsea Abdullah certainly is an it-girl.
An Arab-penned tale that takes place in an Arabia-inspired desert, The Stardust Thief follows Loulie al-Nazari, better known to those who do business with her as The Midnight Merchant. She’s garnered a reputation for seeking out and illegally selling magical artifacts in quantities that no one else can. Little do they know that her elusive bodyguard, Qadir, is actually a jinn, his people persecuted in this world, and she’s aided by her own artifact that helps her complete the task. Though deft in her trade, she draws too much attention to herself after saving the life of a sheltered prince, Mazen, and is then forced by the sultan to find an artifact his family has been seeking for generations- a lost oil lamp binding an all-powerful jinn within. She is accompanied by her faithful bodyguard, the sultan’s oldest son, Omar, and his forty thieves, Aisha. And so goes a twisting adventure through the desert, one filled with jinn, magic, secrets, revenge, and redemption.
This book is reminiscent of Wheel of Time in that all the characters were instantly recognizable, defined, and bright. Though this is usually the case for archetypes, the characters in The Stardust Thief are not regulated to a mold. There is nuance to them and layers to peel back, but you do not need to peel back anything to be invested. Much of this is accomplished by their distinctive voices and motivations. Their backstory, what drives them, eventually comes to light but by then it’s a matter of falling further into the story.
The book is narrated through the rotating perspectives of Loulie, Mazen, and Aisha. Undoubtedly the main character, Loulie is a quiet force. Her back and forth with Qadir is great. She’s tenacious and bruised by a difficult past, but not yet hardened to the point of indifference. Aisha is a much more prickly character, your standard Girl With Knives™. Though there’s less focus on her backstory, it was very easy to sympathize with her motivations and her chapters were some of my favorites. Some of that can be attributed to the great work her audiobook narrator does.
On the flip side, I can not take Mazen’s audiobook narrator seriously. The exaggerated voices he puts on for each character yanked me out of the story. This isn’t really a fault of the writing, but an annoyance I must note. When his voices became too absurd, they inspired a physical cringe or giggle. Maybe it’s because the narrator introduced us poorly, but Mazen and I had a rocky start. Though my love for pathetic characters is well documented, I feared he would be a whiner. I was, thankfully, proven otherwise.
Mazen’s point-of-view was like a breath of earnestness throughout the novel, lending a whole new dimension to the narrative. Not only did he wear his feelings on his sleeve, becoming instantly sympathetic, but he was also the storyteller. The Stardust Thief is inspired by One Thousand and One Nights, a story about the power of stories. Many retellings simply recount, and twist where necessary, the individual stories that the collection is composed of, but The Stardust Thief indulges in them. Stories are interwoven into the narrative and shared with an admirable fervor. The novel understands tales as the push and pull between the teller and the listener, the warnings and wonder that they can inspire. All books reflect a love of storytelling, but this one centralizes that adoration. And I felt it. It was almost like I was a child hearing some of these stories for the first time and inspired by the same warm sort of rapt admiration.
Nostalgia? Maybe. When I was a kid, we had a volume of 10 children’s books, each tome a collection of a different sort of story. One was composed of folk and fairytales, arranged by region. I wore out every single fairytale in that book with the desperation that anyone who loves reading knows. There were only three stories in the Middle East section, all from One Thousand and One Nights, and I must’ve read each one at least three times just trying to catch a glimpse of the culture I came from. Ultimately, it was my mother who orally shared with me the story of Scheherazade. So, there’s a lot of raw emotion tied to the source material of this book, and Abdullah was able to tap it. If you grew up with any of the stories from One Thousand and One Nights, there is another layer to appreciate. If you haven’t, there is still inherently so much to enjoy.
That being said, The Stardust Thief is structured like a quest novel. Since it’s a debut, I know the word count was probably constrained to teeter around the 100k mark, but it would’ve fared much better if it was longer. I like quest novels to be longer, so that you can sit with the characters and don’t feel like that CGI ping-pong ball from Forrest Gump being thrown about. There were so many large confrontations and action pieces, it really felt like any one of them could be the climax. Right as we enter the third act, it’s hard to imagine the climax outdoing what came before it. But, it actually delivers. So, the problem then is not the scenes themselves individually, but the breathing room we have between them. With more time between cornerstone scenes, the audience could have better processed what they’ve learned and contextualized its magnitude in the overall narrative better. Because what sets the final confrontation apart from its predecessors is its depth of emotional inspection.
I am wary of dramatic third-act reveals. Most of the ones I have read recently really do not inform the existing story in any meaningful way, but rather fodder an exciting end with shock value. The reveals in The Stardust Thief were revealing. The twists were twisting. Throughout the book, there is a constant slow drip of reveals that constantly shifts the reader’s perspective and introduces new questions. Then, at the final confrontation, the questions are answered. I fear that I cannot share more, but the drama, the intrigue, it was there.
I’m a fan of The Stardust Thief. It was the first adult high fantasy I’d picked up after a peculiarly long drought and it did not disappoint. Although I wished it had been paced better, all other aspects place it as a strong debut. Chelsea Abdullah’s a talented writer and her books will only get better with time. There wasn’t really a romance in this book, but series with the first book to establish characters and the remaining books to explore their relationships are always the best, so I sure will be picking up its sequel!
★★★★
existing ironically 