I have, I believe, read everything Shannon Chakraborty has in print, or at least the three major novels and companion novella in her Daevabad Trilogy; if she has anything else out there other than maybe some short stories here and there, I’m not aware of them. I liked the Daevabad books enough that I read all of them, of course, but I’d characterize all of them as slower reads; her books have always taken me longer to read than pure word count might indicate, and something about them never quite fully clicked with me. If someone asked me about the series, I’d say something sort of generically positive rather than jumping in with both feet.

I had no idea that she had The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi in her.

I am writing this at work in between bouts of having Things to Do, as I wasn’t able to finish the book until last night, although I feel like this is substantially the exact same review if I had written it a couple of days ago when I had 200 pages left. This is another “take a look at that cover” book. See the pirate ship? Being attacked by something huge and tentacular? Okay. It’s that book. Amina al-Sirafi is a pirate. Retired, at least at the beginning, but a pirate. She’s a mom. She only sorta gets along with her mom. And then she gets handed a job: rescue the daughter of a local noble from her kidnapper, with an enormous reward at stake, and it’s time to put the band back together and go unleash hell.

God, I loved it. I loved every page. This book puts its foot on the gas at about the 100-page mark and it just absolutely does not let up until the very end, and there are pirates and sea monsters and other pirates and magicians and sea monsters and rakshasha and a couple of wry references to Daevabad— the book is technically set in the same universe but 1000 years earlier, and you absolutely don’t need to know anything about Daevabad to read it– and more sea monsters and zombie-things and magic pearls that aren’t pearls and gods and goddesses and celestial bird-thing courts and it is probably not literally a perfect book but it is definitely a perfect book for me and it’s going to be very high on my top 10 list at the end of the year.

Go read it right now.