Wrath of the Dawn: A Book Review

Every dawn brings horror to a different family in a land ruled by a killer. Khalid, the eighteen-year-old Caliph of Khorasan, takes a new bride each night only to have her executed at sunrise. So it is a terrible surprise when sixteen-year-old Shahrzad volunteers to marry Khalid. But she does so with a clever plan to stay alive and exact revenge on the Caliph for the murder of her best friend and countless other girls. Shazi's wit and will get her through to the dawn that no others have seen, but with a catch ...she may be falling in love with a murderer.

Shazi discovers that the villainous boy-king is not all that he seems and neither are the deaths of so many girls. It's up to her to uncover the reason for the murders and to break the cycle once and for all.

Author: Renée Andieh

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

This book made me fall in love with storytelling once again.

I just don’t know how she did it, but she did. I fell in love so hard. With the characters, the storyline, the setting and world she envisioned in her words. Her writing set my imagination alight. A new world was forming inside my head. An addition to the book universe. I absolutely loved it!

The way Renée writes screams storyteller. I could imagine sitting as a child in front of her and this story coming to life as she told it. It’s as if the words danced on the page as I read them. They were alive. I read this book each night before I went to bed and if it wasn’t for university engagements the next day, I would have done the book reader thing, of reading it straight through the night. I was willing to lose sleep because of the way she told the story was that good.

I will be honest and say the storyline wasn’t the best, especially the love triangle between the three main characters. However, she wrote it in such a way that you still fell in love with the very much cliché storyline. She also redeemed it with the side characters, who you are yet to fully discover and understand, as the plot is only told from three main perspectives (with a rogue one occasionally). Leaving space for the reader to slowly discover the true nature of the secondary characters. It also helped you experience the world from an ‘on-the-ground’ perspective, where you didn’t know what was going on through everyone’s mind, much like in real life.

I also love how Khalid’s full character slowly unravels throughout the book. My issue is that it unravels a bit too fast towards the end which I felt was bit uncalled for and some of the decisions made were very un-character like. This may be due to the ending of the book being entirely rushed. But I can also see that it is in line with the feel with how the events would have been in real life. Sudden.

I know I have said this already, but I honestly can’t express how much this book made me fall in love with reading again. It has literally made me so hungry to read again. To delve into lands, lives so different yet so similar yet different from my own. It’s not the best or the most perfect, but it is a book you know love has been put into creation. And that is why you should definitely read this book.

I hope you enjoyed this review. I a few more coming soon. And I’m going to try and mix things up because I don’t want this blog to be a book blog. I’ve also bought the second book and am currently reading it. I should hopefully have a review up by the end of summer at the latest. If you want to read this book, you can do so here.

I’m thinking of spicing up things a bit, so tell me, have you ever read a book that has made you fall in love with reading? Which one? I’d love to know down in the comments :)