'Be swept away in this unique fantasy debut from Sahira Javaid. A spellbinding adventure of belonging, finding hope and where the price of a soul is another soul’s fate. Perfect for fans of InuYasha, Children of Blood and Bone and The Candle and The Flame.
'Nezha Zaman considers her gift to control fire a dangerous secret. A secret that unravels when she encounters a vengeful shadow jinni in a maze garden that has been stalking her family, and knows about her power. Weeks after seeing the demonic being, Nezha is torn from her world through her backyard pond and transported to another dimension which sought out the light inside her heart.
'Nezha learns from two unicorns that the dimension is her family’s roots, and the light is a fragment of an angel’s shattered soul. The three must work together to find the soul’s shards in a land teeming with shape-shifting jinn. If Nezha fails to stop the corrupted Iron Prince, the malevolent jinn at his side will shatter her soul next.'
Crowning Soul already ticked a number of boxes for me before I picked it up, it's an own voices fantasy book with a female Muslim lead, with an alternate world filled with magic and amazing creatures inspired by cultures not always given a spotlight in the genre, and the cover is just gorgeous. I was set to really enjoy this book, and was so excited to read it; so I'm so disappointed that I just couldn't enjoy it at all.
The story starts by introducing readers to our main hero, Nezah, a young woman working in her parents flower shop in Morocco, but hiding her special abilities to control fire, turning it into a weapon. These early chapters were a little difficult to get used to, as it felt a little like I'd perhaps missed something, and I even had to check that this wasn't a sequel novel. But no, this is the first in a planned series. I think part of the problem is that Nezah is introduced already with powers, already knowing about Jinni's, and we have to piece together later on that this is something that she has been dealing with for years and has been getting used to. Unfortunately, as this isn't made clear early on I started of feeling a bit lost.
Once the main story actually begins to kick in Nezah finds herself transported to another world, one filled with magic and monsters, where her family are royalty. Here she's given a quest to recover the pieces of an angel's soul, and is joined on her mission by a pair of unicorns, Sapphire and Thunder. However, this is where the book really began to fall apart for me too.
As soon as Nezah is sent on this mission things begin to happen at a break-neck speed, and it became hard to keep track of everything that was happening, or even why. Instead of one adventure to retrieve this broken soul there's dozens of pieces, with each one having its own little adventure. It felt more like reading summaries of ten minute long episodes of an animated series than actually reading a book. Nezah and her friends arrive at a new place, they meet a local inhabitant who's either good and immediately hands over the piece of soul because they can tell Nezah is good; or they're a villain, so they get in a fight, beat them, and get the soul fragment.
These confrontations happen at such a pace that I found myself forgetting where the characters had been and who they'd met almost immediately after. They jump from location to location, seemingly getting to remote places within a day, meeting magical creatures without batting an eyelid, spend ten minutes getting a soul fragment, and then going home. It became so repetitive that it became boring, and started to be a slog to read.
There also seemed to be little internal logic to some of the events too, such as Nezah being crowned queen of an entire kingdom in one chapter, then learning that she has a relative in this new dimension in another, and that she will stay at her house whenever she's in this world. But, why isn't she staying at a palace or some kind of estate if shes queen? And why does she never have queenly duties to perform, or have anyone from the royal court interact with her? She just gets given a crown and then goes off to do whatever she wants without anyone caring. And this is something that seems to happen often, with people having little to no interest in things, or blindly accepting things at face value and moving on. Nezah's parents learn that she's travelling to a magical kingdom to fight monsters and they react with 'okay, well be safe, see you later'. There just didn't seem to be much internal consistency to the world or characters, and things just happened to serve the story rather than being organic. None of the characters seemed to have a personality or their own drives, immediately doing or saying whatever was needed, even if it made no sense or kept internal logic to things that had come before.
Crowning Soul is marketed as Young Adult, but I can't help but feel that it's being aimed at the wrong audience, and should be a young middle grade book instead. A younger audience, reading a chapter or two before bed each night with their parents might get along better with this book, and will treat it like a cartoon series, where they can did in and out and not really worry about things outside those immediate chapters or an over arching narrative. Older readers might struggle with it where younger children wouldn't.
There's some great stuff in this book, some brilliant ideas, but it all feels bogged down behind things that don't really work, or haven't been given enough time to breath. I feel that perhaps the book could have probably benefited from another draft or two, where some of these issues could have been worked out and some of the excess could have been cut away. As it is, it's a 600 page novel that feels about three times as long, that I couldn't connect with; and I'm so sad that it wasn't the book I was hoping it would be.
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