The Black Khan should be a lot better than it is, and that’s honestly a shame considering how it seems perfectly timed for the zeitgeist.
Have you ever picked up a book at the store (or gotten it in the mail, as the case is with today’s title), looked at it, and then decided you’d take a flyer, only to be really disappointed as soon as you actually started reading? That’s this reader’s experience with Ausma Zehanat Khan’s The Black Khan, sequel to The Bloodprint. (It came in the mail thanks to Harper Voyager.)
Here’s the basic idea of the series as a whole: women known as the Companions of Hira have special abilities thanks to what’s known as the Claim, even as the Talisman rises to enforce more gender-normative rules and a refusal to spread words and writing to the world. This was what I first saw, and lo and behold, I was in.
Magic and knowledge usually get tied together anyway, but conceptually, this sounds like it’s exactly the kind of thing I like to read in general. Also, it basically sounds like there’s some smashing of the patriarchy, and in this year of 2018, we need all of that we can get. In fact, most of the main characters are indeed female in this, with (of course) some men, including a love interest who’s already in love with Arian, our protagonist, and he with her.
So, with all of this in mind, this reviewer cracked open the book and was confronted with what she can only call “old-fashioned fantasy prose.” There are still some conventions observed in fantasy — seriously, if you ever need to boost your vocabulary, this is the genre to do it — but The Black Khan reads like it could have been published decades ago with how heavy it can be in the jargon as well as the simple flow of the sentences. If you’d like a shorter expression, the word is only clunky.
This is not to say that the prose is necessarily bad so much as not to this reader’s taste. I suspect, in a few years that have been genuinely great for fantasy, it won’t be to the taste of a lot of people, either. A long novel is one of the genre’s calling cards, but for people to actually want to finish it, there has to be something to draw you in in the first place. The Black Khan has that with its concept, for sure. However, what it’s lacking is something that will keep people reading. Whether it’s the writing, the worldbuilding, or the characters, one of the three (or, ideally, all three) have to be engaging in some way.
This is where the book fails.
But at the same time, I can see where people would like its attempt to create a huge, sprawling world with legitimate consequences even for its magical heroines. That does seem to be what Zehanat Khan is going for, but it will be hard for some readers to follow her there.