http://bactra.org/weblog/algae-2021-04.html#khan ( )

This is another of those books where I expected to be blown away and ended up with just "yeah, it's nice". We've got a secret society of badass women who gain magical power by reading a sacred book, fight against a misogynistic tyrant, rescue women and children taken by slavers ... sounds like exactly my style. But while actually reading it, I found that the most interesting parts of the plot were overshadowed by the romance and it took me two weeks to read because my interest wasn't really grabbed. ( )

The Audacy (a task), The All Ways (holy place of fountains), the city of Task End, The Assimilate (interpretation of a holy book), The Immolan (religious leader of Taliban stand-in), The Talisman (Taliban stand-in), the Claim (stand-in for Koran)- the clunky. Combine this with a great deal of pining after beautiful men who are either hostile or sleazy or both, and I am DNFing.

I’m not quite sure what to make of this one. the Bloodprint is set in a dystopian future where a destructive war of not-quite-Armageddon proportions has apparently destroyed most of the world outside Central Asia and the Middle East; there things have returned to quasi-medieval technology. The people of Khorasan (roughly corresponding to eastern Iran, Afghanistan, and parts of Central Asia, according to a map in the front matter) are followers of The Claim, a holy book; written versions of The Claim seem to have been mostly lost and it is now transmitted by oral tradition. (A central verse of The Claim is There is no one but the One. And so The One commands, just in case we weren’t sure what holy book The Claim is supposed to represent). Similarly places and things in Khorasan are not very thinly disguised actual places and things; the cities of Hira, Candour, Maze Aura, Marakand, Black Aura, and Ashfall are more-or-less Herat, Kandahar, Mazar el-Sherriff, Samarkand, Bokhara, and Isfahan; and the evil cult trying to destroy literacy and subjugate women in the name of their misinterpretation of The Claim is the Talisman. So far, so good.

The protagonist is Arian, a First Oralist of the Companions of Hira, a group of women dedicated to preserving the true message of The Claim. In addition to being an accomplished warrior, Arian has magic powers; she can recite verses of The Claim that stun or kill enemies, destroy buildings, raise fogs, and so forth. Arian finds herself on a quest for the Bloodprint, an ancient written copy of The Claim. She acquires and loses various friends and companions in generic heroic fantasy fashion.

The heroes and heroines are all suitably heroic; the villains are all disgustingly villainous. Arian is adequately conflicted by having the power to kill with the spoken word. Every few dozen pages Arian and friends are captured by miscellaneous baddies, who never kill them outright, instead making the classic Evil Crazy mistake of imprisoning them – usually kinkily gagged and chained - to await hideous tortures (or, in the case of the women and the young boy, the Fate Worse Than Death). Unexpected rescue always shows up, and they always escape. (At the end of this novel things look pretty bad, but I expect once again rescue will come at the start of the next in the series).

As you may guess from the above, I don’t find The Bloodprint very well written. Still, there are some things of interest and attraction here. For one thing, it’s refreshing to find a fantasy novel based on something other than Northern European tradition. Another is the handling of romance; Ausma Zehanat Khan does interesting things with love scenes. There’s nothing even remotely explicit by modern standards; instead there’s description of the genuine erotic frisson that can come from seemingly casual glances and touches in a culture where personal and physical contact between the sexes is more restrained than ours. When the hero and heroine finally get as far as a kiss the narration of the event is actually more exciting than if they were busy with organs and orifices.

So a mixed review; I want to see what happens so I’ll track down the other novels in the series. ( )