The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi (Amina al-Sirafi #1) by Shannon Chakraborty

I read The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi because Maya told me to. There's honestly no other reason. But it's really hitting a sweet spot for me - fantasy with a kick-ass female main character and a bunch of time on a ship at sea. Can you imagine how gleeful I was when I read the description of this book?

Amina has been a retired pirate for a decade. She's raising her daughter, living her mundane life that involves things like how on earth is she going to pay for a new roof, and things are fine. They're fine. But when the mother of one of her former crewmates comes to her with a new job with a huge payout, who is Amina to turn it down? 

So Amina tracks down some of her old crewmates and adventures ensue.

It's set in the medieval time period of the Indian Ocean and I loved all the details of what day-to-day life and travel might have been like during that time. I also loved that it was about a culture I am woefully uneducated about. Really fun stuff! I have DNFed The City of Brass by this author in the past, but maybe I should give it another try. 

4/5 stars

Lines of note:

For this scribe has read a great many of these accounts and taken away another lesson: that to be a woman is to have your story misremembered. Discarded. Twisted. In courtyard tales, women are the adulterous wives whose treachery begins a husband's descent into murderous madness or the long-suffering mothers who give birth to proper heroes. Biographers polish away the jagged edges of capable, ruthless queens so they may be remembered as saints, and geographers warn believing men away from such and such a place with scandalous tales of lewd local females who cavort in the sea and ravish foreign interlopers. Women are the forgotten spouses and unnamed daughters. Wet nurses and handmaidens; thieves and harlots. Witches. A titillating anecdote to tell you friends back home or a warning. (page 2)

...we departed Mogadishu and followed the Somali coast north for ten days, traversing a distance we likely could have completed in four had we been going in reverse as the winds, common sense, and the accumulated maritime wisdom of centuries advised. (page 196)

"You've got to be kidding me," I finally replied. "This man could manifest as a beam of celestial light, and he chose to use that power to spy on a naked woman?"
"Are you surprised?"
Honestly, no. The details might have been fantastical, but strangely I bought this lunar aspect being a pervert. Men . . . useless, the vast lot of them, celestial and mortal.
"No," I confessed. "Just disappointed." (page 357)

Things I looked up:

littoral (in the author's note) - relating to or situated on the shore of the sea or a lake:

entrepôt (page 187) - a port, city, or other center to which goods are brought for import and export, and for collection and distribution

Socotra dragon's blood trees (page 202) - Dracaena cinnabari, the Socotra dragon tree or dragon blood tree, is a dragon tree native to the Socotra archipelago, part of Yemen, located in the Arabian Sea. It is named after the blood-like color of the red sap that the trees produce. It is considered the national tree of Yemen. 

From Wikipedia Commons. 

Hat mention (why hats?):

...I'd picked up one of the broad straw hats used by field hands for Dalila to wear...(page 200)