REVIEW: Rebel of the Sands

Title: Rebel of the Sands

Author: Alwyn Hamilton

Length: 314

Source: Received a review copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

 

 

Everyone who follows book releases or is even remotely in touch with the online book community will have heard of Rebel of the Sands. I mean this was released the beginning of last year and there’s STILL talk about it. With the sequel just recently released (okay maybe not recently, but March is recent enough for me!) Rebel of the Sands was available to request on Netgalley and I just couldn’t help it!

I’ll just start by saying it’s probably not my favourite YA release and I’m deffo not reading the sequel. To keep my frustrated thoughts as coherent as possible I’ll just bullet point why:

• I tried to go into this story knowing as least as possible, all I knew was that it had a middle-eastern setting (the cover kind of hints at that!) and there was magic involved. SO I wasn’t really prepared for the western concept, and I don’t think I could’ve. I don’t personally think the Western thing worked, being Moroccan means I am VERY familiar with middle-eastern culture and a lot of the aspects for me, just clashed. I tried to read it objectively, but the saloon style setting and the first scene including a shoot out , it just didn’t feel right to me.

Actually, now thinking about it, that was my main problem with this book. Everything else was just a vague blur, the main character didn’t really stand out to me, neither did the world building. It was all just a bit bland.

This is exactly why I steer away from hyped YA books. Obviously not all of them disappoint but it’s becoming hard to manage expectations when reading them. I just didn’t think that this book stood out, it went for typical YA tropes and just didn’t give me enough to have me interested in the sequel.