I loved the washed up heavy metal rocker vibes of this one. Grady always has a way of drawing me in to his books and I enjoyed this quick read!

Overly dramatic and exaggerated, but in the best way. The book takes place around the French Revolution and has great (albeit farfetched) characters with many layers! It starts off with the friendship between two young girls who end up committing a crime and then follows them throughout their lives, in two completely different directions with wonderful side characters (<3 George) along the way. The story gave me a lot of laughs and the commentary and inner dialogues of the characters were a chefs kiss. The characters and themes were sometimes so theatrical that the only way to describe them was satirical, but I can get past it when we’re talking about bringing down the patriarchy. 💅

The descriptive world building and writing for the setting of this story was so well done! I feel like I could easily describe early 1900 steam-ran Cairo and I loved how immersive it felt!

Unfortunately, this was the best part of this book. I’ll start by saying that I should have known that I might not get into it as much because of the agent style detective mystery plot line, but I was hopeful that the historical part and queer main character might help to have a different experience. Unfortunately, I was wrong and thought she had potential, I felt that Fatima fell extremely short of expectations and that the rest of the book just didn’t quite work because of the main characters inability to hold my attention, or frankly, to get me to care about her. I kept rooting for the “bad guy” and couldn’t get past the aversion to police mysteries. Overall, it wasn’t horrible, but was definitely not as great as I was hoping it to be.

Side note: I did LOVE Ahmad and him constantly questioning if he was creepy. 😅😆