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The Bird King cover art

The Bird King

Written by: G. Willow Wilson
Narrated by: Elmira Rahim
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Publisher's Summary

From award-winning author G. Willow Wilson, The Bird King is an epic journey set during the reign of the last sultan in the Iberian peninsula at the height of the Spanish Inquisition.

G. Willow Wilson’s debut novel Alif the Unseen was an NPR and Washington Post Best Book of the Year, and it established her as a vital American Muslim literary voice. Now she delivers The Bird King, a stunning new novel that tells the story of Fatima, a concubine in the royal court of Granada, the last emirate of Muslim Spain, and her dearest friend Hassan, the palace mapmaker. Hassan has a secret - he can draw maps of places he’s never seen and bend the shape of reality. When representatives of the newly formed Spanish monarchy arrive to negotiate the sultan’s surrender, Fatima befriends one of the women, not realizing that she will see Hassan’s gift as sorcery and a threat to Christian Spanish rule. With their freedoms at stake, what will Fatima risk to save Hassan and escape the palace walls? As Fatima and Hassan traverse Spain with the help of a clever jinn to find safety, The Bird King asks us to consider what love is and the price of freedom at a time when the West and the Muslim world were not yet separate.
©2019 G. Willow Wilson (P)2019 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved. Epigraph translation © Richard Davis and Afkham Darbandi, from The Conference of the Birds by Attar
Historical
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A very meandering adventure, annoying characters

I found this story quite annoying to get through. I ended up listening to it on 3x speed because the plot was boring and the characters annoyed me so much.
I have a couple of issues with the way that characters are portrayed, but I'm going to zero in on Hassan. He's a gay. Know how you know that? Because every single man that he interacts with (and I mean EVERY SINGLE ONE) he's gotta tell you that he'd be all about taking that man direct to pound town. I cannot emphasize enough how ~~problematic~~ it is for your one gay male character to be a completely standard-less lust machine. We are supposed to be beyond the idea that the gays are ruthlessly hunting the straights for their gay little sports!! And Yet!
Also Fatima is crazy whiny and I still don't understand her character arc or what she wanted.
The last 3 hours or so are completely pointless. A lot of threads and ideas just go completely unresolved.
Would not recommend.

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