Dancers of the Dawn by Zulekha A. Afzal

Book Review

Pauline Morgan

Advice often given to beginning authors is to write about what you know. For those wishing to produce contemporary fiction, this is a sound precept, and it allows the book to achieve a sense of authenticity. Writers of fantasy are in a difficult situation as they are creating something that, hopefully, no-one has met before. In fantasy novels, many draw on their own experiences and cultures to shape the new world. For many decades, these have largely been from a European, mediaeval period which is rich in folklore and low in technology. Adding magic and fabulous beasts creates excitement and jeopardy. The fantasy has been tarnished with a degree of sameness until recent years. Writers from the rest of the world have brought a new outlook to genre by drawing on the culture and folklore that they are familiar with. Zulekha A. Afzal is one of these.

            Dancers of the Dawn is set in a divided country. Amaar and Mezeer were once one country, but now they are warring factions. Rumour has it that Sana, Queen of Amaar, has denied Mezeer water. Sana is a water-weaver and her magic is the ability to control water.

            Magical ability is only recognised in females and is enhanced by dance. Aasira is one of the dancers in her final year of training. The girls all have different magical abilities. The novel opens with a glimpse into the world that the graduates are about to enter. They are weapons of the state. Aasira is one of four dancers sent to a village, along with three musicians and five guards. As the musicians play, the dancers perform, summoning their magic. One puts the villagers into a state of sleep, another searches their minds for a traitor and when found, a third binds him with snakes of sand until he confesses. Then Aasira executes him, wielding fire.

            This is a good start to a novel introducing the characters and setting within a scene of action. The tension, though, then drops dramatically as the next section details the training of the dancers in readiness for their graduation performance. This is to be attended by Queen Sana. She will select the dancers that she wants to join her household. Others will be posted to the army where they will be expected to use their talents to help the troops in the war that is coming. Although there is a lot about the training and this does get repetitious, the plot does pick up pace once Aasira gets to the Queen’s court. She discovers more about her background and that her memories have been manipulated. She has to pick her way through a complex political situation before she can decide where her loyalties lie.

            There is a lot to like in this novel, but it does suffer from the problems that so many Young Adult books do – the monotony of being in a boarding school. The suggestion is that the main characters, Aasira and the other dancers in her cohort, are sixteen. Curiously, too many other world fantasy novels work on the assumption that the day and year of the created world are the same as ours so it is also assumed that sixteen-year-olds in this setting will have the same degree of inexperience, particularly in romantic matters, that girls of the same age do in ours.

            On the positive side, the combination of dance and music is refreshing and the world that live in is colourful. This is a debut novel and hopefully some of the issues with this will be smoothed out in later works.