This Woven Kingdom by Tahereh Mafi

Rating: 1/5 stars

This is a tiktok book.

I am not sure if it literally is, because I am a child of Allah, and he told me that while the crossdressing is perfectly fine, going on shaitan's app is unforgiveable. However, in a spiritual sense, this is undoubtedly a tiktok book. It is all vibes, no plot--but Persian flavoured. It is yet another case of people enchanted by the novelty of seeing themselves represented, without pausing to ask if that representation is executed well and accompanied by strong prose, a coherent plot, and memorable, distinct characters.

It is hard to summarize this book, because it struggles mightily to stretch a moodboard’s worth of plot for hundreds of pages. Our protagonist is Alizeh, a jinn girl who is heir to the jinn kingdom. She has been living in anonymity in Ardunia, a human kingdom, following the murders of her parents. She makes a living as a servant in a noblewoman’s house and works as a seamstress on the side. Our other main character is Kamran, a human crown prince who will one day take over for his grandfather as king of Ardunia. There is an enemy empire called Tulan with an enemy king…jinn being punished for the devil's actions…a treaty between humans and jinn called the Fire Accords…the devil shows up to offer deals to kings and riddles to Alizeh…an orphan boy who tries to rob Alizeh but she befriends him instead…assassination attempts…uh…Alizeh has to get to a ball where Kamran has to select a wife…magic dresses…magic Cinderella shoes…and so on.

As usual, there is too much to discuss, so I’ll focus on the main points that bothered me.

THE QUALITY OF THE PROSE, WHICH, AS IT INSISTS ON ALWAYS EXPRESSING ITSELF IN SUCH A REMARKABLY LONG-WINDED AND FANCIFUL MANNER, IS NIGH ON IMPOSSIBLE TO STOMACH, UNTIL EVEN THE MOST EXPERIENCED READER WITH THE BEST OF VOCABULARIES IS FILLED WITH DESPAIR AND OCCASIONAL DOUBT WITH REGARDS TO THE TRUE DEFINITIONS OF VARIOUS WORDS IN THE ENGLISH LEXICON, SO THEY ARE FORCED TO

I’ll stop there.

This is what the entire book is like. I believe this is what fans call “lush prose” and critics call “purple prose.” I prefer to call it pretentious and often incomprehensible. I appreciate a distinct literary style and I have no difficulty parsing historical literature with all its colons and semicolons and half-page-long sentences, but this “style” feels like the author opened a thesaurus and pulled synonyms at random.

The prose is made even more incomprehensible by weak grammar, constant repetition, and unnatural dialogue. The whole book is rife with examples such as:

“She shivered violently then, nearly missing a stitch, nearly toppling into the fire.”

“Her single candle quickly found, the sought after match was promptly struck, a tear of air and the wick lit.”

“ ‘Please don’t tease me. You said you wouldn’t.’

‘I’m not teasing you. I’m stating a fact. You are very strange.’

‘And you, sire, are unkind.’

‘You’re crying in a dark room the size of my thumb; the door is but paces away. Surely you see that you are being nonsensical.’

‘Oh, now you’re just being cruel.’

‘I’m being honest.’

‘You are being needlessly mean.’

‘Mean? You say this to the man who just saved your life?’

‘Saved my life?’ Alizeh said, angrily wiping away the last of her tears. ‘How easily you praise yourself. You hardly saved my life.’

‘Didn’t I? Was not your life in danger? Is that not why you were crying?’

‘Of course not, that’s n--’

‘Then you accept my point,’ he said. ‘That you were in no real danger. That you were being nonsensical.’

‘I--’ She faltered. Her mouth fell open. ‘Oh, you are a horrible person. You are a mean, horrible--’

‘I am an extremely generous person. Have you already forgotten how long I allowed you to sit on me?’

Alizeh gasped. ‘How dare y--’

She stopped herself, the words dying in her throat at the muffled sound of his laughter, the palpable tremble of his body as he struggled to contain it.

‘Why do you rile so easily?’ he said, still fighting a laugh. ‘Do you not see that your effortless outrage only makes me want to provoke you more?’

Alizeh stiffened at that; felt suddenly stupid. ‘You mean you were teasing me? Even after I asked you not to?’

‘Forgive me,’ he said, the smile lingering in his voice. ‘I was teasing you, yes, but only because I’d hoped it was distract you from your fear.’ ”

Apologies for that third long excerpt, but I think it best illustrates the problem. “You are teasing me because you are mean because you are a mean tease who teases women meanly,” she said with outrage because she was an outraged person experiencing outrage at his mean teasing.

I’m half convinced that Tahereh Mafi had a minimum word count and was employing the college student hack of repeating everything and making the sentences as long as possible. Or perhaps her editor forgot to hit ‘save’ before sending out the revised manuscript. Whatever the reason was for the writing style, it made for an exhausting reading experience.

ANGRY MEN WHO ARE ANGRY AND MASCULINE BECAUSE THEY ARE MEN FULL OF SUCH MASCULINE ANGER

The male characters in this book are not men, but Men. They are all tall, muscular, self-important individuals who seem like they would be afraid to use a tote bag at the grocery store lest someone mistake them for one of those flamboyant homosexuals.

Kamran is the textbook Dark Brooding Love Interest: and nothing but that. Early on we are told that:

“Anger…kept him alive better than his heart ever had. He felt anger always, but he felt it especially now, and Lord save the man who crossed him when he was at his worst.”

He is also a drama queen, as evidenced by the many times that he is posing--and rarely in a self-aware way, either:

“He’d brought with him only a small, patterned red rug which he’d unfurled upon the snowy forest floor, and upon which he now reclined. He stared impassively at the impressive grove, at the fluorescent pink trunks and their fluorescent pink leaves. Fresh snowfall had obscured the miles of green moss blanketing the ground, but the endless white drift lent its own cold beauty to the scene.

Kamran closed his eyes as a breeze skated along his face, mussing the glossy black waves of his hair. He heard the sweet chirp of a pair of songbirds, the buzz of a rare dragonfly. The hawk circling high above might’ve witnessed only a young man in repose, but the humble ant would’ve known better, would’ve felt the violent tremble emanating from his limbs, fracturing across the forest floor.

No, Kamran’s anger could not be contained.”

I believe that these quotes are supposed to make Kamran seem imperious and intimidating, but instead he comes off as spoiled and ridiculous. To be fair, Hazan (his minister) calls him spoiled and ridiculous in certain scenes, and Kamran acknowledges this, but in other scenes, like the ones I quoted above, the narration takes him seriously.

Hazan, at least, is not as angry and dramatic as this, though he is conveniently tall and muscular and does not have a personality beyond remarking upon Kamran’s childish behavior. By the time Cyrus (yet another tall and muscular individual) showed up, I had given up on any man in this book having a real personality, so I hoped that at least his equation with Alizeh would be different--but alas, they have the same lukewarm and repetitive attempt at charged bickering as Alizeh and Kamran.

Then there’s the issue of women. Alizeh does not have a meaningful relationship with any other woman. There is an attempt at friendship with Miss Huda, but it falls flat. Miss Huda is fat, dark-skinned, and has a large nose. None of these are inherently negative qualities, but Miss Huda is self-conscious about all of them due to societal norms. Alizeh, who has agreed to make dresses for Miss Huda for the ball, helps Miss Huda feel less self-conscious by putting her in clothing that fits her properly and by telling her that she should not be ashamed of her features. So we have a thin, light-skinned woman (whose nose shape and size is undescribed, so we can safely assume that it is not large) telling the woman with societally unconventional features to love herself as she is.

Not to mention that the thin, light-skinned woman is constantly referred to as beautiful in the chapters from Kamran’s point of view…but at no point is Miss Huda referred to as beautiful OTHER THAN when Alizeh is responding to Miss Huda’s self-deprecating comments. Is the book truly telling us that being fat, dark-skinned, and/or having a large nose is beautiful? Or that, regardless of whether or not it is beautiful, it does not lessen a human being’s dignity, humanity, and worth? Or is it just lip-service, because Miss Huda is written as self-deprecating, ridiculous, untrustworthy, and incapable of doing anything herself?

Besides these odd depictions of gender, there is an equally odd depiction of class. At several moments, Kamran is disturbed by Alizeh’s current “lowly” status as a servant. Not because of the poor treatment that she (and all the other servants in Ardunia) are subject to, but because she is “was born a queen but made her living by scrubbing floors.” He briefly considers that Alizeh’s miserable situation in Baz House reflects poorly on his aunt’s treatment of her servants, but he does not take this thought beyond basic acknowledgement and continues to be fond of his aunt anyway.

Of course, characters do not have to have the “correct” opinions throughout the entirety of a book--it would be quite boring if they did--but given the narrative’s trajectory, this feels less like a specific character having a specific mindset, and more like a muddled theme. We do not know the names of the other servants at Baz House, or any other place for that matter. The most we get are the names of the housekeepers, who are cruel and often beat the servants for minor mistakes. Over and over, the narration tells us that the tragedy of Alizeh’s life is that she was raised so that she could one day rule her people, but now she is scrubbing floors and sleeping in cramped closets. The fall from nobility to poverty is the tragedy, not the poverty in itself. If Alizeh had been a servant since birth, would Kamran--or the narrative, for that matter--care as much about her plight?

Not to mention that repeatedly, characters state that Alizeh’s supposed eloquence (which, like the narration, is often just over-use of a thesaurus) distinguishes her from other lower-class individuals. Many social movements originate from people with working class backgrounds, people whose families have experienced socioeconomic hardship for generations. It feels tone-deaf to automatically ascribe revolutionary, well-articulated ideas to a noble upbringing.

LADIES. WHAT IS GOIN ON.

It feels like barely anything happened in this book. This is a shame, because it had worldbuilding elements with such potential. In the first few chapters, Alizeh is visited by the devil, who recites an ominous riddle to her. The devil has been a fixture of her life since the day she was born. This is cool! I was genuinely excited by the devil’s presence in this book and hoped that it would be a solid plot point! Surely you can’t make something like this boring!

Of course you can! By TELLING it to us:

“Indeed it was with some pain that she acknowledged the circumstances of her birth: that it had been the devil to first offer congratulations at her cradle, his unwelcome ciphers as inescapable as the wet of rain.”

This is all we get. We see the devil arrive to tell the riddle to Alizeh in the present day, but no actual scene of him showing up with a pacifier for baby Alizeh.

In a similar vein, we are TOLD that Alizeh crawled into the hearth as a child and that this revealed her status as heir to the jinn kingdom; TOLD that Alizeh escaped the gallows because she was accused of using jinn abilities to make a complicated dress in a short period of time; TOLD that on coronation day, the new king of Ardunia will be offered a deal from the devil and a prophecy from a diviner; and so on. If all of these scenes (and many more like them) had actually been written rather than simply told to us, this book might have had at least some semblance of a plot.

The only somewhat interesting scenes are when Alizeh fights off a group of assassins by herself and when the devil shows up to deliver his riddles. Though Alizeh’s reactions during the latter scenes are tiresome--people find ways to deal with all sorts of consistent mental and physical hardship, but Alizeh’s only method after eighteen years of receiving visits from him is to quake and plead for him to leave her alone. Shouldn’t he be an old friend by now, like a panic attack? You know it’s coming. You don’t always know when, you don’t always know how, but you know that inevitably, it will come again. Your options are to figure out how to deal with it or…quake and plead for things to magically improve, I guess.

The ending is a separate mess altogether. There is a ball…magic dress and magic shoes…Miss Huda is there…an enemy king whose master is the devil….Alizeh takes way too long to figure that out…magic fire…the king is murdered…a sword fight…a dragon? It felt like in movies when everyone in the cast stands around so they can say “I contributed to the climax of the story!” Part of me thinks that perhaps book one is just one long setup for when the real plot will start in book two, but 1. books should stand alone in terms of story structure, because not everyone will be able or willing to read the successive books, 2. I am not optimistic given the abysmal writing quality of the first installment.

In the end, it doesn’t matter. The real audience for this is all the girls on tiktok who make earnest dua to marry a 6’3 bearded man who will fully provide for them financially while also being open-minded in a surface-level manner, and I am sure that they enjoyed this book immensely.