Review: Lots of Action, No Logic
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 05 22, 2014
Two brothers, Samir and Ghassan are childhood friends with a young girl, Asima.  Their world is torn apart when their town is invaded by an evil Pelasian satrap.  The three become separated and take very diverse paths in life.S.J.A. Turney is one of my favorite authors. I have read all the books in the Marius' Mules series and a few others.  I was sadly disappointed in this book.  While the people and locations are all fictitious, there still should be some logic to events. As children, the three friends act and think more like grown adults.  That seemed very false to me.  At one point Asima is a member of  a Sultan's  harem. Women in harems are closely guarded so they will not  have contact with men.  Yet, we are told after the fact that Asima had managed to bribe a guard to kiss the Sultan's wife as the Sultan comes along, Asima had put a slow acting poison in the guard's drink and she had placed the bottle of poison in the guard's room so it would look like suicide.  For a member of a harem to be wandering around, buying poison (how did she learn what poison to get and where?) being with a guard to put the poison in his drink, and then going into the guards' barracks to leave the poison in a guard's room (how did she find out which room was his?) just seemed too unbelievable to me.  Most of the plot devices also had that unbelievable quality to them.Asima seems to spend most of her time glaring at people and thinking about how she would like to torture them. Samir spends most of his time grinning as he comes up with convoluted plans that depend on how other people will act but he won't tell anyone what those  plans are, he just grins when asked.  Ghassan spends most of his time brushing his curly black hair off of his forehead. Oh, how I wished he would get a haircut.There is a lot of action in this novel but  I was really disappointed as  the book  just became a chore to read.