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jackThrone of the Crescent Moon has been a little internet-famous recently as a swords-and-sorcery style novel set against a generic arabic world instead of a generic european world, with ghuls, ghul hunters, corrupt caliphs, etc, etc.
The main characters are an ageing ghul hunter, the last real ghul hunter in the city, his young assistant from a sect of ascetic warriors-for-god, a couple of his friends, and a young woman from a desert tribe with the gift of lion-shape.
They separately discover someone is raising unprecedently strong and evil ghuls with the aid of some ancient near-forgotten magic, and try to track him down, but get embroiled in the politics along the way.
Good things
* The setting is interesting
* The characters, while a bit generic, are good
* He does a very good job of showing the characters from each others' point of view -- not spectacularly well, but enough to show the characters from quite different perspectives
* It was enjoyable and easy to read
Bad things
* I couldn't put my finger on this until I read some other reviews, but everything other than the setting was _very_ generic, you know basically what's going to happen by having read the same tropes elsewhere. Towards the end of the book I was a little confused because there was a "twist" I assumed was coming based on the set-up so far, but didn't.
* It's probably better than most swords and sorcery novels for including female characters (there are two good female characters who get about as much screen time as the non-protagonist male characters), but they're not as protagonist-y and some islamic feminist critiques were annoyed that it didn't really reflect any experience of being an arab woman other than what you'd see as a man.
The main characters are an ageing ghul hunter, the last real ghul hunter in the city, his young assistant from a sect of ascetic warriors-for-god, a couple of his friends, and a young woman from a desert tribe with the gift of lion-shape.
They separately discover someone is raising unprecedently strong and evil ghuls with the aid of some ancient near-forgotten magic, and try to track him down, but get embroiled in the politics along the way.
Good things
* The setting is interesting
* The characters, while a bit generic, are good
* He does a very good job of showing the characters from each others' point of view -- not spectacularly well, but enough to show the characters from quite different perspectives
* It was enjoyable and easy to read
Bad things
* I couldn't put my finger on this until I read some other reviews, but everything other than the setting was _very_ generic, you know basically what's going to happen by having read the same tropes elsewhere. Towards the end of the book I was a little confused because there was a "twist" I assumed was coming based on the set-up so far, but didn't.
* It's probably better than most swords and sorcery novels for including female characters (there are two good female characters who get about as much screen time as the non-protagonist male characters), but they're not as protagonist-y and some islamic feminist critiques were annoyed that it didn't really reflect any experience of being an arab woman other than what you'd see as a man.