Book review: The Stardust Thief by Chelsea Abdullah
Taking modern fantasy and giving a fresh spin on it, Chelsea Abdullah’s debut novel The Stardust Thief is a wonderful read that bleeds charm and adventure right from its opening paragraph. I went into this book with pretty high expectations and it turned out even better than I’d hoped. Abdullah takes the tropes of a quest storyline and grounds them in Arabic culture, oral storytelling, and the tales of the One Thousand and One Nights. The result is a near-perfect debut that hardly misses a beat all the way through its 400+ pages.
Let’s discuss why this book was so great, but first, a warning: there will be some very mild spoilers in this review, by which I mean you’ll know slightly more than the back-of-book description. Now that that’s been taken care of…
Neither here nor there, but long ago…
The first thing to know about The Stardust Thief is that it’s a really fun adventure fantasy…but Abdullah won’t hesitate to rip your heart out and cackle as she stomps on it. I can’t recall the last book I read that so thoroughly hooked me from the charm and style of its opening paragraphs. I was immediately sucked into the headspace of the story’s two main point-of-view characters: Loulie, the legendary magic seller known as the Midnight Merchant; and Mazen, a moderately inept prince with a heart of gold and penchant for storytelling.
Abdullah deserves a lot of credit not just for writing gripping prose, but also for bringing the sort of fun and whimsy I’d expect out of an author like Neil Gaiman, where a few extra words here or there make the whole book a more lively affair. At the same time, for all that fun I just mentioned, The Stardust Thief does get quite dark at times. It’s not a grimdark fantasy by any means, but there were a few points where I was totally shocked that Abdullah actually went where she did with some of the twists. The Stardust Thief is a very emotionally accessible book for readers of different ages, but it will put your heart through its paces.
A big part of that is how vividly realized the story’s characters are. We get one more point-of-view character in Aisha, one of the infamous Forty Thieves and a fearsome jinn hunter. Rounding out our group of mismatched heroes is Qadir, Loulie’s jinn bodyguard. Qadir never gets his own point-of-view chapters, but is no less awesome. The interplay between the different characters who end up going on a quest to retrieve a mythical lamp said to contain a captured jinn king is a highlight; Abdullah has a gift for immersive dialogue.
A journey into the Sandsea
I mentioned a magic lamp a second ago, which brings us to the worldbuilding. If you’ve enjoyed the One Thousand and One Nights or some of its tales like Aladdin’s Wonderful Lamp and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, there will be elements of The Stardust Thief that will feel quite familiar. That said, Abdullah does a great job of putting her own twist on them, as well as weaving in Arabic culture and vocabulary in a way that is refreshing to see in a mainstream fantasy book.
As for the twists, they are many and some of them are shocking. In addition to outright shifts in the plot, oral storytelling is a huge theme that Abdullah plays with very effectively in The Stardust Thief. Different people and cultures have different versions of stories, and the varying details often conceal secrets. Despite having a familiar premise — the journey to find a magic lamp — this book kept me guessing right down to its very last page.
That said, the book did end on a total cliffhanger that felt, if not quite abrupt, kind of sudden. Some series try to play off their first installment as a standalone story, but The Stardust Thief is not one of them. Yes, it wraps up some plotlines, but ends on a note that makes it clear there’s a lot more story to come.
Also, if you’re the type of fantasy reader who needs a thoroughly defined magic system, there isn’t one in The Stardust Thief. There’s a lot of magic, and most of it has nuance in terms of how it works, but overall you never know what magical plot point lies around the corner. Personally, I loved that, but it bears mentioning.
Verdict
The Stardust Thief was even better than I’d hoped it would be, and I hoped it’d be terrific. It’s an amazingly solid debut that I’d feel comfortable recommending to just about any fantasy fan. The story is accessible yet complex. It has mystery, magic and a found family that you can’t help but root for (even when they aren’t getting along).
There are slated to be two more books in the trilogy, and you can bet that they’ll be some of the biggest books of the season whenever they release. The Stardust Thief is out now from Orbit, wherever books are sold!
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