[REVIEW] The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi, by Shannon Chakraborty

(Buy this book here.)

This book is absolutely delightful and this review will do it no justice. You have been warned.

Amina Al-Sirafi is a middle-aged single mother with bad knees who lives in a modest country house and minds her own business.

She was also one of the most fearsome pirates who ever sailed the Indian Ocean, at least until strange magic claimed a beloved crewmember and drove her to retirement on dry land. When a mysterious connection to her past comes calling with a simple but lucrative job, she rounds up her respectably retired former crew and takes to the high seas again, only to find that the stakes are far higher and the reward much more important than anyone expected.

I don’t think I can fit everything I love about this book in this post. It’s funny, it’s magical, it’s heart-in-your-throat thrilling. The adventure is big, the characters lovable, and the villains truly nefarious. There’s magic, romance, monsters, and a villain with a long European name our heroine can’t be bothered learning how to pronounce. It’s everything I want in a historical fantasy adventure and didn’t know already existed.

The book is set in post-Crusades, High Middle Ages Yemen, Oman and Somalia, which is unusual but really shouldn’t be. The time period, its people, and its culture are extraordinarily well-depicted, and I hope that all of the little sequel teasers pan out and we get more of it. These pirates live in a cosmopolitan, multicultural, religiously mixed world, and their story is steeped in mythology and history from the region. It is profoundly satisfying to read this and remember that epic imagination is not culturally limited. Everything is written with an eye for historical detail and the flighty fantastical and it all works together wonderfully.

These are rogues poorly working out redemption through adventure, which means they will cuss, cheat and steal, but finish in time for prayer. They’re raising their kids using the money made from grand larceny on the open seas. They’re also diverse in what I’ve come to think of as a normal way. Amina is a Muslim of what she calls “mixed coastal ancestry”, and her crew includes African Muslims, Arab Christians and at least one Southeast Asian Hindu. The religious pluralism of the world works into the story seamlessly. The book also delves much deeper into sexuality and gender than I think people who are not familiar with Islamic reality would expect. Queer themes, gender difference, and sexuality are mentioned but never equated unnecessarily with sin. Sin, however, is mentioned quite a bit because um, hello? PIRATES. This is a book about pirates and while they’re all quite lovable, they also do dastardly things for treasure, and charm us readers into cheering them on while they do it.

One of the reasons I loved this so much is the fun of discovering the world and the story cold, so I won’t say anymore, although I’m gagging to. There is some interesting author info, though, which I’ll discuss in 5, 4, 3, 2…

This book is so culturally detailed and so deeply authentic in its treatment of Islam, the diversity of Muslim cultures and religious pluralism and secularism in both the present day and the long-ago past. It’s just so wonderfully global that I was very surprised to find out that the author, despite her surname, is an American white woman from New Jersey. She converted to Islam in her teens, married into a family of seeming Southeast Asian descent(going by the name) and apparently studies the region, religion and history. She does it very well. I never had that moment we have all often had where you pause and squint and wonder if someone outside of a culture wrote something just to be cool. I admit to being puzzled and a bit put off when I first Googled her, but this book is so good that I got over it in about 5 pages. Your opinion may differ, but ultimately, this book is a work of cultural appreciation, not appropriation. If you’ve been on this blog awhile you know I have no problem flaming silly white authors when it’s deserved, but that is not at all the case here. This book is good, on its own merits. Go read it.

Good maps, heaps of treasure, and restful shore leave to The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi