Malik is trying to justify his response, and Karina is about to jump in when Afua arrives out of nowhere, attacking Karina and crying that her family has been taken prisoner because of the raids by the Sentinels. Far too many YA fantasy novels have this bland, inoffensive mode of story-telling-- and not inoffensive in, "wow, there's nothing un-PC in this book, I am so angry! Finds out at the end of the story that she has the ability to summon storms with her magic that has been repressed most of her life. It just has the same sort of bland, plodding story-telling that countless other young adult fantasy books of this type has, which is made evident by its BLANK OF BLANK AND BLANK formatted title. After consulting with Idir, who is still trapped in his mind, Malik finds that he is able to summon Nadia out of her prison, and the three siblings are reunited.

Karina and Malik have only a handful of scenes together and it's as insta-love as you can get, since they fall for each other after maybe three interactions over a couple of days.If I had to draw connections back to Aladdin, I would have to admit that Malik and Karina’s relationship does read similarly to Aladdin and his princess (or Aladdin and Jasmine, if we’re going with Disney). Most of the secondary characters are used as plot devices to move Malik and Karina into place as the story progresses and lack much genuine depth or growth that makes them worth mentioning. Brown has admitted to using Ghanaian folk tales as an inspiration for her book, this story isn’t really a fairy tale or folk tale retelling.

Every minute was riddled with stories and folklore and it was all just so magnificent that I couldn’t really put the book down (had to force myself to most of the time). Karina knows now that she can’t kill Malik, not with the feelings that she has for him, so she declares Malik disqualified because of a technicality and declares Tunde the winner, even though she doesn’t want to kill him either. Malik then is speaking with one of the council members who is verbally abusing one of the Eshran workers, not knowing of course that Malik is really Eshran. Malik is poor and part of a discriminated-against cultural minority, and he and his sisters end up in a Jareth from Labyrinth-type situation with one of the gods when his younger sister accidentally makes a bargain and the only way to save her is to, you guessed it, assassinate the princess Karina. Sometimes, it's this nobody, skinny kid, plagued by terrible anxiety, and magical powers that he was made to think was maddness.Just as Farid is about to strike down Karina, Malik appears and offers to let Idir possess his body so he can kill Karina himself. and although im not as obsessed with the plot (full of YA clichés) and characters (karina is soooo annoying) as everyone else seems to be, i still found this to be a pretty good story. Since no one believes magic really exists, Malik performs a story about Hyena, the popular mythical trickster, using his illusions as accents to his story. He takes Malik’s sister Nadia prisoner and says he will only release her if Malik kills the princess by the end of Solstasia.