Djinn City

Djinn City

by Saad Hossain
Setting: Bangladesh
Published on November 2017
Pages: 413

Indelbed is a lonely kid living in a crumbling mansion in the super dense, super chaotic third world capital of Bangladesh. When he learns that his dead mother was a djinn — more commonly known as a genie — and that his drunken loutish father is a sitting emissary to the djinns (e.g. a magician), his whole world is turned inside out. Suddenly, and for reasons that totally escape him, his father is found in a supernatural coma, and Indelbed is kidnapped by the djinn and delivered to a subterranean prison. Back in the city, his cousin Rais and his family struggle to make sense of it all, as an impending catastrophe threatens to destroy everything they know. Needless to say, everything is resting on Indelbed’s next move — and he’s got a new partner to help him: the world’s most evil djinn.

This book is long.  This book is dense.  Try to just breezily rush through this and you will miss things.  This book is also smart and sarcastic and snarky and everything else I love.

Indelbed is adorable.  He’s from the embarrassing part of a prominent family.  He’s pretty much being ignored by his alcoholic father who is in turn ignored by the extended family.  He’s just going about his life the best he can hoping that maybe someday one of his aunts will notice that things are really not ok in his life when he gets kidnapped by a djinn.

From here there are three stories taking place.

  1. Indelbed is thrown in a murder pit where he lives with a djinn prisoner for 10 years while they plot an ambitious escape.
  2. Indelbed’s father is in a coma and his spirit is watching the history of an epic battle through the memories of the people who were there.
  3. Indelbed’s aunt Juny and cousin Rais find out that djinn are real and set out to figure out what happened to Indelbed.

I liked storylines 3 and 1 the best.  Along the way there are wyrms that the prisoners tame in hopes that one will grow into a dragon to help them escape.  There are also djinn airships and submarines and hidden bases in the sky.  Djinns don’t physically fight amongst themselves any more.  Now they engage in legal wrangling that can go on for decades.  Breach of contract is their greatest sin.

It is a very hard book to describe.  It is one where the pleasure is in the journey, not the destination.  In fact, I’m quite annoyed by the end of this book.  Mostly I’m annoyed by the lack of ending of this book.  Obviously this is set up to have a sequel because the book just stops.  Storyline 3 turns in a whole new direction about to have an adventure in the last pages.  It isn’t even a cliffhanger.  It is a “Hey, let’s go look at this new thing……” and we’re out of pages.  The other two stories are likewise incomplete.  I actually kept looking for more pages of book because it was just, “Now we are done.”