Twelve Kings in Sharakhai

I don't really understand contemporary authors that latch their new world on to excisting stuff on Earth in an attempt to create a different world. Twelve Kings In Sharakhai is set in a desert city, including niqabs, turbans, face veils, crescent moons, henna tattoos, curved swords, the likes, yet all that just seems token exoticism. It's not Earth, since the world has two moons and immortal kings, yet it is very much Earth, and I never really had the feeling I was reading a story about another world -- a bit of a problem for secondary world fantasy.

A good early indication of said problem are spices: authors tend to show the otherness of their new world by piling on the abundance of tastes, smells and colors, preferably on crowded, buzzing markets. It has become such a cliché. And increasingly inefficient, since most of these species have become available in about any mainstream store where I live too. "The bright flavor of cardamom and caramelized onion and lemon zest" features on page 17. Cardamon really is the winner to indicate a Middle-Eastern vibe, and unsurprisingly the first tasty seed mentioned. A few pages further, "already the heavy breeze carried scents of rose and jasmine and sandalwood". Beaulieu keeps on dropping these sets of three throughout the book: "a lush display of flowering herbs -- valeria and veronica and Sweet Anna." Enumerations like these are one of the hallmarks of supposedly "detailed, rich world building".

As you might have guessed from the tone of the above, the first book of The Song Of The Shattered Sands series didn't really do it for me. It's not a bad book -- it's a lot better than Throne Of The Crescent Moon -- but all things considered, it doesn't get much more than a shrug of my shoulders. It's hard to pinpoint exactly what went wrong, but I think the book would benefit from these three fixes:

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