From the Riley Locke desk
The oldest premise in the world keeps a seat on the enemies list, and The Wrath and the Dawn sits in it: a retelling of the Thousand and One Nights in which the girl who volunteers to marry the murderous king does so with a knife in her plan and a dead best friend on her ledger. Renée Ahdieh's duology opener is the desk's pick for the canon's most literal enemies-to-lovers. The hero has ordered the deaths of dozens of brides, the heroine arrives intending regicide, and the book's whole wager is whether it can walk that floor without falling. The desk reports, with residual astonishment, that it walks.
Khorasan wakes each dawn to the same atrocity. The boy-king Khalid takes a bride at sunset and has her executed at sunrise, and no one alive knows why. When the toll takes Shiva, who was Shahrzad's dearest friend, Shazi does the unthinkable and volunteers, the first girl to walk in willingly, carrying a plan built from her only weapon. At sunset she tells him a story and stops before the ending. Dawn comes, and the king who never spares anyone lets her live to finish it, and the nights begin to accumulate. Ahdieh's structure honours the source with real cunning: the stories Shazi tells run as nested tales with edges, each one an argument aimed at her audience, while the days build a court of silk, poison, and watchers, and a slow, appalling problem — the monster is not presenting as a monster, and the reason for the dawns, when it surfaces, refuses to stay simple. The desk will keep the reason folded. It rearranges the moral floor of the entire book, and readers deserve the vertigo.
What the desk admires most is that Shazi's rage is never traded in for the romance. She falls, and she does not stop keeping the ledger; the book lets grief and desire hold the same rooms, and her outside allies — a first love turned rebel among them — keep the cost visible. The prose is jewelled in the manner of its source, the food is described criminally well, and the ending is a genuine cliff with the second volume waiting.
Honest notices: content guidance for executions and grief, inherent to the premise; the register is young-adult-and-upward with the darkness structural. Heat is charged and restrained.
Who is this for? Retelling readers, enemies purists who want the word to mean something, and everyone who believes a story can be a siege engine. Stay past dawn. That is the whole point.