Kimberly's Novel Notes: Review: The Wrath & The Dawn by Renee Ahdieh

Grade: 4.5 Butterflies

Series: The Wrath and the Dawn #1

Author: Renee Ahdieh

Publisher: G. P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers

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.

This book has been hyped up so much since it has released and I am very wary about reading hyped up books. So, needless to say, I was nervous going into this one. I had such high expectations and I was afraid this book wasn't going to meet them and I was going to be immensely disappointed. However, even with my high expectations I was blown away by this book! The characters were amazingly dynamic, the writing was breathtaking and made me feel all the emotions, and the plot was so gripping that I was on the edge of my seat the whole time!

One of the things that really stood out for me in this book was the amount of POVs it had. The way the POVs were set up it allowed you to see the big picture. You didn't get to see one single individual's story, you saw them all and how they all connected to one another. This was a wonderful way to tell this story because it accented the love story between Khalid and Shahrzad and really put together the story.

The writing was outstanding! It was so beautiful and breathtaking! I could not get enough of it! It captivated me and left me wanting more. Renee Ahdieh is a brilliant author! It was so amazingly written that all of the emotions the characters felt were so real. While reading this book I felt everything the characters felt and that just made the book! It gave the characters so much more depth and made the reading experience so much better!

The characters in this book were amazing! They were so beautifully written and, as I said in the last paragraph, everything the characters felt, you felt and that added so much to their depth. I think why I loved these characters so much was because they had faults, they weren't perfect. They had problems, they had trust issues, they had hatred in their hearts, and that made them seem so real! That also allowed us to see the good in them, especially Khalid. By highlighting the characters faults, it allowed the writer to have them grow and for us to slowly see their goodness. This made them so complex and wonderful to read!

On that note, I loved how there wasn't a clear evil person or villain; everyone had a valid reason for whatever they did, whether it was raging war or killing innocents. You could never really be mad at any of the characters, even the ones ruining other's lives because they never intended for it. No one wanted to ruin anybody's lives and when they did the guilt destroyed them. This just added so much to the story because it made the characters so much more complex since you could never fully hate any of them.

The only aspect that I didn't really like was how fast Shahrzad started developing feelings for Khalid. It was toeing the line between insta-love and kind of fast love. However, this didn't really affect the story for me because of the intense and raw emotions the characters felt and the author beautifully wrote. If this book didn't have this emotional aspect to it this kind of maybe not insta-love thing would have really bothered me, but the emotions made it seem real.

Overall, this was a beautifully written an emotional raw book that blew me away! I loved almost everything about it, the characters, the world, the plot, the feelings, everything! I can't wait for the next book because I need to know how their story ends, I need to know! I would highly recommend this book to every single person ever.

This book got...

4.5 Butterflies

Beautiful, this is a great book.