Double Feature! 1001 Nights Retellings – ARC Review vs. Subscription Box

A Thousand Nights by E. K. Johnston vs. The Wrath and the Dawn by Renee Ahdieh

Rating

2.5/5 vs. 4/5

I received a copy of A Thousand Nighst as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I received a copy of The Wrath and The Dawn as part of my subscription to Uppercase Box.

Goodreads Descriptions

A Thousand Nights

Lo-Melkhiin killed three hundred girls before he came to her village, looking for a wife. When she sees the dust cloud on the horizon, she knows he has arrived. She knows he will want the loveliest girl: her sister. She vows she will not let her be next.

And so she is taken in her sister’s place, and she believes death will soon follow. Lo-Melkhiin’s court is a dangerous palace filled with pretty things: intricate statues with wretched eyes, exquisite threads to weave the most beautiful garments. She sees everything as if for the last time.But the first sun rises and sets, and she is not dead. Night after night, Lo-Melkhiin comes to her and listens to the stories she tells, and day after day she is awoken by the sunrise. Exploring the palace, she begins to unlock years of fear that have tormented and silenced a kingdom. Lo-Melkhiin was not always a cruel ruler. Something went wrong.

Far away, in their village, her sister is mourning. Through her pain, she calls upon the desert winds, conjuring a subtle unseen magic, and something besides death stirs the air.

Back at the palace, the words she speaks to Lo-Melkhiin every night are given a strange life of their own. Little things, at first: a dress from home, a vision of her sister. With each tale she spins, her power grows. Soon she dreams of bigger, more terrible magic: power enough to save a king, if she can put an end to the rule of a monster.

The Wrath and the Dawn

A sumptuous and epically told love story inspired by A Thousand and One Nights

Every dawn brings horror to a different family in a land ruled by a killer. Khalid, the eighteen-year-old Caliph of Khorasan, takes a new bride each night only to have her executed at sunrise. So it is a suspicious surprise when sixteen-year-old Shahrzad volunteers to marry Khalid. But she does so with a clever plan to stay alive and exact revenge on the Caliph for the murder of her best friend and countless other girls. Shazi’s wit and will, indeed, get her through to the dawn that no others have seen, but with a catch . . . she’s falling in love with the very boy who killed her dearest friend.

She discovers that the murderous boy-king is not all that he seems and neither are the deaths of so many girls. Shazi is determined to uncover the reason for the murders and to break the cycle once and for all.

Rage’s Echo by J.S. Bailey – Review

Rage’s Echo by J.S. Bailey

Rating

2.5/5

I received a copy from the author in exchange for an honest review.

Goodreads Description

He longs for heaven…and revenge.

Jessica Roman-Dell, a paranormal investigator from small-town Ohio, wants to find a ghost to prove that life continues after death. Little does Jessica realize the danger she’ll face when the spirit of a murder victim named Jerry Madison follows her home from a graveyard one night and refuses to leave.

Jerry says he is lonely. He wishes to go to heaven because watching the world pass by without him is more unbearable than death itself. But Jerry is there for another reason that will hit closer to home than Jessica ever could have imagined.

For Jerry is not as innocent as Jessica thinks. Like his murderers, he, too, has killed–and he will stop at nothing to send those responsible for his death to the grave.