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The Everlasting
Alix E. Harrow
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Gideon the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #1)
Tamsyn Muir
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Spring 2026 Readalong
Read at least 1 book in the Spring 2026 Readalong.
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Água Viva
Clarice Lispector
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Pereira Maintains: A Testimony (Penguin Modern Classics)
Antonio Tabucchi
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I picked this up hoping for a relaxing and fun fantasy meets murder mystery meets steampunk read but unfortunately it didn't quite work for me. For the first half, I often felt like I was missing some information. While this is partly lack of knowledge on my part (I am not very familiar with arabic culture and its lore of djinns etc), I also felt that I was missing backstory. This impression was confirmed to me when I read on pagebound that this book has three prequel novellas.
I properly got into it for the second half, but it still fell flat for me. While we were constantly being told that Fatma was this overachieving cop, we never really got to see her talent. In fact, I thought the main characters had very little agency and the plot was mostly driven by events that happened to them, which hindered the flow of the story. At the very end, there was almost a slapstick element to the unraveling of the problem, which did not really fit with how the story was told previously. Overall, I thought this novel tried to be too many things at once (a steampunk novel? a murder mystery? a fantasy epic?) and it didn't quite work out for me.
That being said, I thought the steampunk Cairo setting very unique and I would love to read and learn more about Djinns and Ifrits etc in a fantasy novel setting. I loved the descriptions of the outfits in this books as imo that is an underused way of painting a picture of a character. My heart definitely belongs to the side characters, Siti and in particular Hadia, whom I would have loved to read more about. Overall, I would consider picking up another book set in this world (maybe one of the prequels? let me know which you would recommend!) but this one didn't do it for me.
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A Master of Djinn (Dead Djinn Universe, #1)
P. Djèlí Clark
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The Raven Scholar (The Eternal Path, #1)
Antonia Hodgson
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How Not to Die (Too Soon): The Lies We’ve been Sold and the Policies that can Save Us
Devi Sridhar
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Yesteryear
Caro Claire Burke
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Women in the Picture: What Culture Does with Female Bodies
Catherine McCormack
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Money to Burn
Asta Olivia Nordenhof
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A Master of Djinn (Dead Djinn Universe, #1)
P. Djèlí Clark
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On the Calculation of Volume I
Solvej Balle
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I Make Envy on Your Disco
Eric Schnall
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Sea Now
Eva Meijer
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Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power
Byung-Chul Han
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The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves
J.B. MacKinnon
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The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917-2017
Rashid Khalidi