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Recent Reads

I actually have time to read again, and it's seriously the best. I've missed it so much, and am going to be trying new genres this summer while participating in my work's summer reading program. So, here's the first! 

I started off with The Wrath and the Dawn and The Rose and the Dagger by Renee Ahdieh. I loved these two books so much that I actually bought my own copies to have because these will definitely be books I re- read. 
 
I made sure to get the hardcovers because the paperbacks don't have the red overlay, and I love the overlay. 

I highly recommend these books. They're a retelling of Arabian Nights, or One Thousand and One Nights. Shahrzad volunteers to marry the king of Rey, Khalid. There's only one problem. For the last few months Khalid takes a new bride and kills her in the morning. One of those brides was Shahrzad's best friends. So, she volunteers to marry Khalid with plans to kill him. The only problem is staying alive past the morning. 

These books are fantastic. I loved the plot, and the language is beautiful. Ahdieh does a really good job of throwing you into the middle of the desert and making it feel authentic. She also includes a lot of folk tales from the middle east that I've never heard before, which were fun to see woven in. The romance in these books is swoon worthy, and Shahrzad is a very strong female character. I also liked that this was a duology and not a trilogy. These were pretty fast reads for me, and I liked having the story wrapped up in two books instead of three. 

There's a big debate in the book world about needing diverse books. There are not just white people in the world, yet the majority of books published only have white people as their main characters. The only white character in this entire series was a slave, which was honestly a bit refreshing. These are great diverse books, and do it in an authentic way. I really hope to meet Renee Ahdieh one day. Until then, I'll keep suggesting these to people, and hoping someone reads them and loves them just as much as I did. 

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