This deceptively simple book shows the difference between religious faith and religion as a tool of power. This is not a romance, which is refreshing! ( )

I'm still reeling a little from the abrupt ending, but I'm still marking four stars because I really want let it soak in for a while, then read it again. ( )

The Bird King is a fantasy novel that begins with the fall of the last Islamic state on the Iberian Peninsula, the Emirate of Granada, to the forces of the Spanish monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand in 1491. Fatima is a 17-year-old concubine enslaved by the sultan who grew up in the palace, and her only friend is Hassan, the court cartographer. Hassan has the magical ability to shape reality with his maps which brings him to the attention of Luz, an outwardly kind but darkly zealous representative of the Spanish Inquisition.

Fatima and Hassan flee with the aid of the jinn Vikram who is half-man, half-dog. Eventually they are joined by a Breton monk named Gwennec. Their goal is to find the mythical island of the Bird King - a place not unlike Avalon - using Hassan's enchanted map. The book is a great blend of historical fiction with magical realism and really a great character study. It's also beautifully written.

Favorite Passages:

"It does no good to fake a conversion of faith. Remember that, my love. The people who want to burn you alive will find a reason to do it, whether you pretend to agree with them or not.”
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What could she say? She could not envision a God who demanded such particularity of belief, whose mercy and forgiveness were confined to such a precise segment of humankind. Nor, if it came to that, could she fathom hell, which seemed a somewhat contradictory place: you could be sent there for behaving in the right way but believing in the wrong God, or for believing in the right God but behaving in the wrong way. And that, in turn, threw heaven into disarray, since those who both believed and behaved rightly were invited to indulge in the very pleasures for which those who behaved wrongly had been sent to hell.
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The real struggle on this earth is not between those who want peace and those who want war. It’s between those who want peace and those who want justice. If justice is what you want, then you may often be right, but you will rarely be happy.”
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“Once a story leaves the hands of its author, it belongs to the reader. And the reader may see any number of things, conflicting things, contradictory things. The author goes silent. If what he intended mattered so very much, there would be no need for inquisitions and schisms and wars. But he is silent, silent. The author of the poem is silent, the author of the world is silent. We are left with no intentions but our own.”
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"Some ideas are so beautiful that even evil people believe in them. I thought the abbey would be full of saintly folk, but it wasn’t. Isn’t. It used to depress me. But I’ve come to realize that I must share God with the things that God has set askew.”

( )

3 and a half stars. set in the time of the Fall of Granada (last holdout of the Muslim culture in Spain), this entry into the subgenre of arabian fantasy adds djinn and a magic mapmaker to the mix, and tells a very absorbing tale that has some interesting ideas and eventually involves the Spanish Inquisition and some version of Atlantis. i thought the story kinda goes lame and falls apart near the end of the novel, in this case, but i really wish the author would write more novels, and if she does i'll be there. ( )

I really loved the fantasy elements in this, but towards the end, things became confusing and not fully explained. ( )