Sorry, this book gave me really unpleasant vibes. That poor teenage girl was not a heroine in any way. She was a victim. I wanted to her to flee to a women's shelter and escape from that disturbing marriage and the creepy (rape-y) genie. *shudder*

This was not a book for me.
This promised an aladdin retelling with fantasy but it soon turned out to be a romance and I was disappointed.
Thanks NetGalley for giving me an opportunity to read and review this e-ARC.

A ghost in the lamp? No it is not an Aladdin story. A djinni is imprisoned in an urn by an evil sorcerer and he hopes to regain his freedom by finding the reincarnation of his old love. But when he finds her the woman is already married so he tries to move her archaeologist husband out of the way.

A beautiful cover, a promising beginning but it was not the book for me. The two male characters: the husband and the djninni irritated me to bits. They are not the type of men a woman will dream of. Somehow I did not "feel" the love of Yassir for his long lost love. No sparks at all. Also sometimes a bit unclear what happens. Sex is so not described that at certain points I wondered if that just happened or not.

At 70% I more or less had enough. The story droned on. So I skipped till 90% to find out the story was not ending but just a part 1. I hate that!

Not a badly written book but just not the book for me. Too fantastic? Or just characters I could not identify with?

I’ll start by saying I had concerns this might be too “erotic romance that just kind of happens to have a djinni” for my taste. Something about the cover and blurb just gave me that vibe. But my love of djinn won out, I decided to give the book a try, and luckily my concerns were unfounded. Despite the romance being the focus, the book didn’t have a typical romance feel, it wasn’t full of sex scenes, the djinni aspect was a very integral part of the story, and it was the complexity of the characters and their situation that made this book stand out.

The whole book had a mysterious, ominous, serious feel. The writing was just the right amount of lavish and elegant to fit the story. The historical settings were richly and vividly depicted (I especially loved the depiction of Cairo, even though the time spent there was very brief). This is an author who clearly can write.

I did feel, however, the book could’ve been more polished or trimmed. There were some brief forays into POVs that didn’t seem necessary. There was sometimes too much description for my taste. There were scenes when “less is more” might’ve worked better (like the torture scene). None of these things were terrible, they mostly just slowed the book down. Also, this is the first in a series, but the book still ended in kind of an abrupt spot.

Something I loved though was this author’s version of djinn! They weren’t human. They could turn into mist and shapeshift. They had magic. They could be bound to objects and turned into wish-granting slaves by sorcerers. And the descriptions of Yasir’s appearance, clothes, and home inside the urn were so beautiful. I didn’t understand all the rules governing Yasir’s magic since he was bound but could also do magic of his own free will, but that doesn’t mean there were no rules, it just means I didn’t know what they were.

Last but certainly not least… These characters were not likeable people, but I found myself not entirely blaming them for the bad things they were doing, and that was my favorite aspect of the book. Their situations were not black-or-white, and I loved that they gave me such mixed feelings.

Overall, while I did have a few complaints about the pacing and some things that could’ve been trimmed, I loved the mixed feelings these morally gray characters gave me with their whole complicated situation, I loved the portrayal of djinn, and I definitely think this author can write. Plus, it seems like the plot is going to get more intense and interesting in the next book!

I thoroughly enjoyed the plot, atmosphere, and characters. I would recommend the book to friends and family for their reading pleasure.