Indelbed is a lonely kid living in a crumbling mansion in the super dense, super chaotic third world capital of Bangladesh. When he learns that his dead mother was a djinn — more commonly known as a genie — and that his drunken loutish father is a sitting emissary to the djinns (e.g. a magician), his whole world is turned inside out. Suddenly, and for reasons that totally escape him, his father is found in a supernatural coma, and Indelbed is kidnapped by the djinn and delivered to a subterranean prison. Back in the city, his cousin Rais and his family struggle to make sense of it all, as an impending catastrophe threatens to destroy everything they know. Needless to say, everything is resting on Indelbed’s next move — and he’s got a new partner to help him: the world’s most evil djinn.
This book is long. This book is dense. Try to just breezily rush through this and you will miss things. This book is also smart and sarcastic and snarky and everything else I love.
Indelbed is adorable. He’s from the embarrassing part of a prominent family. He’s pretty much being ignored by his alcoholic father who is in turn ignored by the extended family. He’s just going about his life the best he can hoping that maybe someday one of his aunts will notice that things are really not ok in his life when he gets kidnapped by a djinn.
From here there are three stories taking place.
Indelbed is thrown in a murder pit where he lives with a djinn prisoner for 10 years while they plot an ambitious escape.
Indelbed’s father is in a coma and his spirit is watching the history of an epic battle through the memories of the people who were there.
Indelbed’s aunt Juny and cousin Rais find out that djinn are real and set out to figure out what happened to Indelbed.
I liked storylines 3 and 1 the best. Along the way there are wyrms that the prisoners tame in hopes that one will grow into a dragon to help them escape. There are also djinn airships and submarines and hidden bases in the sky. Djinns don’t physically fight amongst themselves any more. Now they engage in legal wrangling that can go on for decades. Breach of contract is their greatest sin.
It is a very hard book to describe. It is one where the pleasure is in the journey, not the destination. In fact, I’m quite annoyed by the end of this book. Mostly I’m annoyed by the lack of ending of this book. Obviously this is set up to have a sequel because the book just stops. Storyline 3 turns in a whole new direction about to have an adventure in the last pages. It isn’t even a cliffhanger. It is a “Hey, let’s go look at this new thing……” and we’re out of pages. The other two stories are likewise incomplete. I actually kept looking for more pages of book because it was just, “Now we are done.”
When American mom Lenora Chu moved to China with her little boy, she faced a tough decision. China produced some of the world’s top academic achievers, and just down the street from her home in Shanghai was THE school, as far as elite Chinese were concerned. Should Lenora entrust her rambunctious young son to the system?
So began Rainey’s immersion in one of the most radical school systems on the planet. Almost immediately, the three-year-old began to develop surprising powers of concentration, became proficient in early math, and learned to obey his teachers’ every command. Yet Lenora also noticed disturbing new behaviors: Where he used to scribble and explore, Rainey grew obsessed with staying inside the lines. He became fearful of authority figures, and also developed a habit of obeisance outside of school. “If you want me to do it, I’ll do it,” he told a stranger who’d asked whether he liked to sing.
What was happening behind closed classroom doors? Driven by parental anxiety, Lenora embarked on a journalistic mission to discover: What price do the Chinese pay to produce their “smart” kids? How hard should the rest of us work to stay ahead of the global curve? And, ultimately, is China’s school system one the West should emulate?
She pulls the curtain back on a military-like education system, in which even the youngest kids submit to high-stakes tests, and parents are crippled by the pressure to compete (and sometimes to pay bribes). Yet, as mother-and-son reach new milestones, Lenora uncovers surprising nuggets of wisdom, such as the upside of student shame, how competition can motivate achievement, and why a cultural belief in hard work over innate talent gives the Chinese an advantage.
Lively and intimate, beautifully written and reported, Little Soldiers challenges our assumptions and asks us to reconsider the true value and purpose of education.
The author is the first generation American daughter of Chinese immigrants. She had a hard time reconciling her parents’ attitude toward education with her American school experiences. Now she and her American husband moved to Shanghai just in time for their oldest child to join the Chinese school system at age 3. Should he go to the state school or should they send him to an international school?
The book follows the first few years of Rainey’s Chinese education. It both affirms and challenges what the author thought she knew about Chinese education. From the first days when the children are continually threatened by the teachers with arrest or not being allowed to see their parents again if they don’t sit still to the teenage years and the national obsession with the college entrance test, she examines the effect of authoritarian teaching. The results surprised her.
I come from a family of teachers. What I learned from this book is that being a teacher in China is way better than being a teacher in the U.S.
Teachers are to be highly respected. The proper response to a request by a teacher to a parent is, “Yes, teacher. You work so hard, teacher.”
Bribery and gift gifting to teachers are both expected and illegal. These aren’t little gifts either. Vacations, gift cards with a month’s salary on it, and luxury goods are considered appropriate.
She talks about the other downsides of Chinese teaching, besides the threats.
Force feeding children
Public shaming
No help for special needs kids
Crushing amounts of homework and additional classes with tutors that start as young as age 3
Indoctrination in Chinese nationalism and communism
Rote rule following and stifling of creatively
On the plus side, there is:
Well behaved children who respect their elders
Fluency in written and spoken Mandarin and English before high school age
Advanced math skills
She talks to migrant parents who have left children at home in the rural areas of China in order to be able to afford their education. She talks to teenagers who are preparing for the college entrance exams and have differing takes on how to get ahead.
Ultimately she decides to leave Rainey in Chinese school up until 6th grade if he is still doing well. He will learn Mandarin almost fully by then and be strong in math. He will escape the pressures of the high school and college entrance exams that can crush students. They will continue to preach thinking for himself at home.
I did enjoy this look at education across China. I’d recommend it for anyone interested in educational theory. The narration was very well done in both Chinese and English.
Reading this book contributed to these challenges:
For two decades, Zeba was a loving wife, a patient mother, and a peaceful villager. But her quiet life is shattered when her husband, Kamal, is found brutally murdered with a hatchet in the courtyard of their home. Nearly catatonic with shock, Zeba is unable to account for her whereabouts at the time of his death. Her children swear their mother could not have committed such a heinous act. Kamal’s family is sure she did, and demands justice. Barely escaping a vengeful mob, Zeba is arrested and jailed.
Awaiting trial, she meets a group of women whose own misfortunes have led them to these bleak cells: eighteen-year-old Nafisa, imprisoned to protect her from an “honor killing”; twenty-five-year-old Latifa, a teen runaway who stays because it is safe shelter; twenty-year-old Mezghan, pregnant and unmarried, waiting for a court order to force her lover’s hand. Is Zeba a cold-blooded killer, these young women wonder, or has she been imprisoned, like them, for breaking some social rule? For these women, the prison is both a haven and a punishment; removed from the harsh and unforgiving world outside, they form a lively and indelible sisterhood.
Into this closed world comes Yusuf, Zeba’s Afghan-born, American-raised lawyer whose commitment to human rights and desire to help his homeland have brought him back. With the fate this seemingly ordinary housewife in his hands, Yusuf discovers that, like the Afghanistan itself, his client may not be at all what he imagines.
“My full height, my beloved husband never did see
Because the fool dared turn his back on me.”
This is a heartbreaking story about women’s lives in Afghanistan. In this book women feel more free and open in prison than they did at home. Zeba meets many women after the murder of her husband. Most of them are in prison for zina – sex outside of marriage. That can mean anything from a premarital sex to an affair to rape to just being rumored to be alone with a man. This book depicts a society that places so much value on a man’s honor but it measures that honor entirely by the behavior of woman instead of behavior of the man.
Everyone knows that Zeba’s husband was not a good man. However, now that he is dead, his honor (that he did not uphold in life) is of the most importance. The fact that Zeba was arrested when she is found sitting by his dead body and not murdered by her neighbors is seen as a very merciful act. No attempts are made to collect evidence. She was there so obviously she did it.
Yusef, an Afghani-born American-raised lawyer, has just come back to Afghanistan to work on cases like Zina’s. She drives him crazy by refusing to participate in her own defense.
The prison life in this story reminded me a lot of the South Korean prison that Sun in is in Sense8, if you’ve seen that show. The women come from backgrounds so dominated by men that many of them are finding life better in jail.
This book does drag a little in the middle while the mystery of Zeba’s husband’s death is being investigated and Yusef is trying a bunch of strategies to get Zeba free. I liked the inclusion of her mother who is considered to be able to do magic. Zeba uses what she learned from her mother to gain status in prison even though she is conflicted about it.
About Nadia Hashimi
Nadia Hashimi was born and raised in New York and New Jersey. Both her parents
were born in Afghanistan and left in the early 1970s, before the Soviet
invasion. In 2002, Nadia made her first trip to Afghanistan with her parents.
She is a pediatrician and lives with her family in the Washington, DC, suburbs.
Find out more about Nadia at her website,
connect with her on Facebook, and follow her
on Twitter.
Reading this book contributed to these challenges:
Facing challenges in an increasingly colonial world, Chye Hoon, a rebellious young girl, must learn to embrace her mixed Malayan-Chinese identity as a Nyonya—and her destiny as a cook, rather than following her first dream of attending school like her brother.
Amidst the smells of chillies and garlic frying, Chye Hoon begins to appreciate the richness of her traditions, eventually marrying Wong Peng Choon, a Chinese man. Together, they have ten children. At last, she can pass on the stories she has heard—magical tales of men from the sea—and her warrior’s courage, along with her wonderful kueh (cakes).
But the cultural shift towards the West has begun. Chye Hoon finds herself afraid of losing the heritage she so prizes as her children move more and more into the modernising Western world.
This is an historical fiction novel set between the 1870s and the 1940s in Malaysia. In this area of Malaysia at the time it was common for people to be of mixed ethnic heritage. But now the British have started to establish a presence. Towns and cities are growing. Chye Hoon’s father decides to learn English and move the family to a larger city to get ahead. Although she is smart, she is not able to go to school. She is headstrong and not beautiful so stays unmarried for a long time before becoming a second wife to a Chinese man who left his family behind in China.
This story focuses on the way the world is changing around Chye Hoon. She is taken to a backwater town after her marriage. She watches Ipoh grow into a mining center. She sees her children grow up and learn English as their major language. Even her daughters are able to be educated. But her family traditions are very important. She longs to be able to pass on the stories that were told to her and the traditions of the families in her area. Her children are not interested.
What do we lose in the name of progress?
I had never heard of the Nyonyas and Babas. It took me a while to understand exactly what those terms meant. This is from Wikipedia.
Members of this community in Malaysia address themselves as “Baba Nyonya”. Nyonya is the term for the women and Baba for the men. It applies especially to the Han populations of the British Straits Settlements of Malaya and the Dutch-controlled island of Java and other locations, who have adopted Nusantara customs — partially or in full — to be somewhat assimilated into the local communities. Many were the elites of Singapore, more loyal to the British than to China. Most have lived for generations along the straits of Malacca. They were usually traders, the middleman of the British and the Chinese, or the Chinese and Malays, or vice versa because they were mostly English educated. Because of this, they almost always had the ability to speak two or more languages.”
When you try to investigate Nyonya culture, the first things you see are food. Food played a big part in this story. Chye Hoon is widowed and has to make a living. She decides to sell traditional Nyonya food to the men working in the tin mines of Ipoh. Her specialties are cakes. Here is a video of a type of Nyonya cake.
I really enjoyed this book. I was immersed in her world that was changing so rapidly that by the time of her death it was unrecognizable. This series will be continuing and picking up with the story of her daughter-in-law in World War II. That book comes out in the few months. I’m glad for a bit of a break in between because I feel like a need to mourn a bit for amazing life of Chye Hoon before switching the main character of the story to the daughter-in-law.
About Selina Siak Chin Yoke
Of Malaysian-Chinese heritage, Selina Siak Chin Yoke (石清玉) grew up listening to family stories and ancient legends. She always knew that one day, she would write. After an eclectic life as a physicist, banker and trader in London, the heavens intervened. In 2009 Chin Yoke was diagnosed with cancer. While recovering, she decided not to delay her dream of writing any longer.
Reading this book contributed to these challenges:
It's 1943. As air-raid sirens blare in Japanese-occupiedTaiwan, eight-year-old Saburo walks through the peach forests of Taoyuan. The least favored son of a Taiwanese politician, Saburo is in no hurry to get home to the taunting and abuse he suffers at the hands of his parents and older brother. In the forest he meets Yoshiko, whose descriptions of her loving family are to Saburo like a glimpse of paradise. Meeting her is a moment he will remember forever, and for years he will try to find her again. When he finally does, she is by the side of his oldest brother and greatest rival.Set in a tumultuous and violent period of Taiwanese history — as the Chinese Nationalist Army lays claim to the island and one autocracy replaces another—The Third Son tells the story of lives governed by the inheritance of family and the legacy of culture, and of a young man determined to free himself from both.
This synopsis sort of made me cringe. I’ve read the whole “my brother is marrying the girl I want” story so many times. I’m over it. This isn’t that though. There was a delightful change.
Saburo gets the girl. Actually, even better, the girl makes up her own mind and chooses him over his brother. Yes, a female main character with agency. I love her. She’s tough and independent minded. She’s chafing under the demands of her time and place. She’s determined to change her life and basically pushes him to get them where they need to be. That isn’t the whole point of the book either. That happens partway through and the rest of the book is about their life.
I’d recommend this one to any historical fiction fans especially if they are looking for settings you don’t often see. I hadn’t read anything about Taiwan prior to these books. This is set during a period of a lot of unrest in Taiwan and did a great job explaining the history.
Reading this book contributed to these challenges:
Set against the backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution, a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the signal and plans to invade Earth.
A fabulous story of gods and demons, shapeshifters and martial arts . . .
This is part of a series that I started earlier and I read a lot of the books this year. I didn’t review them because it is too confusing if you haven’t read them all.
Enter the world of Kagaya-hime, a sometime woman warrior, occasional philosopher, and reluctant confidante to noblemen–who may or may not be a figment of the imagination of an aging empress who is embarking on the last journey of her life, setting aside the trappings of court life and reminiscing on the paths that lead her to death.
In a blazing hot desert in Saudi Arabia, a search party is dispatched to find a missing young woman. Thus begins a novel that offers rare insight into the inner workings of a country in which women must wear the abaya in public or risk denunciation by the religious police; where ancient beliefs, taboos, and customs frequently clash with a fast-moving, technology-driven modern world.
When New Yorker Rachel Chu agrees to spend the summer in Singapore with her boyfriend, Nicholas Young, she envisions a humble family home and quality time with the man she hopes to marry. But Nick has failed to give his girlfriend a few key details. One, that his childhood home looks like a palace; two, that he grew up riding in more private planes than cars; and three, that he just happens to be the country’s most eligible bachelor.
Noah’s wife is Na’amah, a brilliant young girl with a form of autism (now known as Aspergers). Na’amah wishes only to be a shepherdess on her beloved hills in ancient Turkey–a desire shattered by the hatred of her powerful brother, the love of two men, and a disaster that threatens her world.
Jessica Jacobs-Wolde worked hard to rebuild her life in Miami after the disappearance of her husband, David, and the death of her daughter Kira at his hand. Four years later, she is still coming to terms with a shocking truth: David, who is part of an ancient group of immortals — a hidden African clan that has survived for more than a thousand years — gave Jessica and their second daughter, Fana, the gift of his healing blood. – Book 2 in a series
Nefertiti and her younger sister, Mutnodjmet, have been raised in a powerful family that has provided wives to the rulers of Egypt for centuries. Ambitious, charismatic, and beautiful, Nefertiti is destined to marry Amunhotep, an unstable young pharaoh. It is hoped by all that her strong personality will temper the young Amunhotep’s heretical desire to forsake Egypt’s ancient gods, overthrow the priests of Amun, and introduce a new sun god for all to worship.
Phoenix was grown and raised among other genetic experiments in New York’s Tower 7. She is an “accelerated woman”—only two years old but with the body and mind of an adult, Phoenix’s abilities far exceed those of a normal human. Still innocent and inexperienced in the ways of the world, she is content living in her room speed reading e-books, running on her treadmill, and basking in the love of Saeed, another biologically altered human of Tower 7.
Then one evening, Saeed witnesses something so terrible that he takes his own life. Devastated by his death and Tower 7’s refusal to answer her questions, Phoenix finally begins to realize that her home is really her prison, and she becomes desperate to escape.
But Phoenix’s escape, and her destruction of Tower 7, is just the beginning of her story. Before her story ends, Phoenix will travel from the United States to Africa and back, changing the entire course of humanity’s future.
In The God Who Begat a Jackal, the 17th-century feudal system, vassal uprisings, religious mythology, and the Crusades are intertwined with the love between Aster, the daughter of a feudal lord, and Gudu, the court jester and family slave. Aster and Gudu’s relationship is the ultimate taboo, but supernatural elements presage a destiny more powerful than the rule of man.
When a massive object crashes into the ocean off the coast of Lagos, Nigeria’s most populous and legendary city, three people wandering along Bar Beach (Adaora, the marine biologist- Anthony, the rapper famous throughout Africa- Agu, the troubled soldier) find themselves running a race against time to save the country they love and the world itself… from itself.
This gloriously written tale—set in modern-day Rwanda—introduces one of the most singular and engaging characters in recent fiction: Angel Tungaraza—mother, cake baker, keeper of secrets—a woman living on the edge of chaos, finding ways to transform lives, weave magic, and create hope amid the madness swirling all around her.
A remarkable literary debut — shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize! The unflinching and powerful story of a young girl’s journey out of Zimbabwe and to America.
What would I recommend most?
If you like mysteries – Finding Nouf.
If you like science fiction – Lagoon and The Three Body Problem.
If you like historical fiction – Nefertiti and Noah’s Wife.
Djinn City by Saad Hossain 
