Streetwise Nahri has used her wits to survive on the streets of early eighteenth-century Cairo for all of her life, wanting nothing more than to save up enough money (which she gains mainly through fleecing rich people out of money she figures they don't really need) to move to Istanbul to study real medicine. She doesn't think too much about her inexplicable abilities--that she can fluently speak and understand any language after hearing it just once, that she can sense another's illness and, often, heal it by laying her hands on the spot and thinking intently--and she dismisses the warnings of her only real friend, a Jewish apothecary, that holding a zar--an exorcism--is just not a good idea.
Nahri does it anyway, and after singing songs in every language she can think of to coax the evil spirit out of the girl, she sings a song in a language she has known all her life--but has never heard anyone speak. As she finishes the song, something feels different, and she hears a very angry voice in her head.
But the voice goes silent, and she's so busy collecting her fees that she ignores her uneasy feelings, successfully squashing them until much later, when she leaves a tea house and takes a shortcut home through a sprawling cemetery on the outskirts of the city. There, the angry voice that spoke in her head takes form...out of smoke and ash. She has summoned a djinn with her song, and he is very, very angry about it.
They don't have much time to argue, though, because other spirits Nahri would have said were just fairy tales and ghost stories begin to arrive, and they seem intent only on killing Nahri and the djinn. An ifrit and a whole host of ghouls launch their attack, and Nahri's djinn sends her to find a carpet in a new-looking mausoleum. She does, not even thinking much about why because she's so frantically worried about evading the claws of the hungry. After finding the carpet and fighting off a few ghouls, she drags the carpet outside, where the djinn stands surrounded by very dead ghouls, and she passes out.
She wakes to realize they are miles from Cairo, for the djinn has magicked the carpet. She learns his name is Dara, and he is taking her to Daevabad, the capital city of the daevas, or djinn. Dara is full of mysteries and secrets (and is also, of course, incredibly handsome and arrogant and a marvelous fighter and pretty prejudiced against humans--which makes sense since he has spent the last 1,400 years enslaved to some very awful human beings). Nahri has secrets of her own, and perhaps the biggest one is a secret she has yet to uncover--her own past and origins. For Dara assumes she must have djinn blood of her own, even though she looks fully human, since she can heal herself and others and speak languages so easily. He believes she might be the only survivor of a race of daevas, the Nahid, that were his people's great healers and his own race's patrons, those he swore his life to serve and protect, but that seems impossible because the last two Nahid were brutally murdered about twenty years before.
So, they head to Daevabad, but there are problems brewing there as well, problems Dara knows nothing about, as he's been essentially "lost" as a slave to humans for 1,400 years. They plunge right into the midst of this trouble, causing ripples and currents that threaten to destroy the whole kingdom. Dara has to confront the demons of his past, coming to grips with the horrible things he once did at the demand of the Nahids, still not sure exactly how he was brought back from his slave state and whether he is even fully alive (he doesn't actually breathe or bleed). Nahri has to come to terms with who she is and who she wants to be, figuring out whether she fits in this world she never imagined existed. And the other daevas, including the royal family, are shaken/delighted/outraged by the return of Dara and the appearance of Nahri, as all of their plans are called into question.
This is a great book with a setting I haven't read much about, so I definitely enjoyed learning more about the mythology, culture, and traditions of this time and place. It's also the first book in a trilogy, so there are two more books to add to the world creation. I have read the second as well (and read this one a couple of times), but the third hasn't yet been published, so I am eager to complete the overall story arc once it comes out at the end of June.
The book alternates between Nahri's chapters and Ali's. Ali is the second son of the king of Daevabad. He is an idealist, a brilliant scholar and highly trained soldier, preparing to serve as the battle commander and chief protector of Muntadhir, his worldly older brother, when he is king. He is even more prejudiced than Dara, if that is possible, and he isn't prepared to like either of them. But he strikes up a close friendship with Nahri, and this friendship leads to all sorts of interesting consequences.
So far, it's a great series, and when I dug around on S.A. Chakraborty's website today, I learned that she's already working on something new that, according to the early review will be a mix of "Sinbad the Sailor and Ocean's 11." What's not to love there?
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