In the Empty Quarter - G. Willow Wilson - ★.½

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AUTHOR: G. Willow Wilson
GENRE: Historical Fantasy
RATING: 1.5 stars.

In a Nutshell: Meh. Typical, typical, typical!


Story Synopsis:
(Too bored to type one, so simply copying it from Goodreads. It’s accurate enough.)
Jean is the young wife of an American businessman searching for oil near the Persian Gulf in 1952. In the bustle of the market and the dark eyes of her husband’s colleague, Jean is searching for something else: a life far from the one she knows. Then, after one wrong step in a desert gully, Jean finds herself trapped in a cave-in—and she’s not alone. When legend comes to life and offers a path forward into the unknown, for Jean there is no going back.


What you can expect from this story:
😐 Characters:
👉 A typical naïve white woman whose eyes open after an unexpected encounter.
👉 A typical self-absorbed white man more interested in exotic discoveries than in his own wife.
👉 A typical middle-eastern man focussed on the white memsahib, until he’s suddenly not.
👉 An atypical fantastical being who seems to come from a hodgepodge of cultures. The only “person” in the story with some personality, but the sketching wasn’t accurate to the culture.

😐 The historical setting (1950s Persian gulf) is strong but clichéd.

😐 The fantastical element comes too late.

😐 A reference to ‘Vikram and Betal’, one of my favourite legends, but how is this Indian story connected to the Arabian setting?

😐 Some truly great themes herein – colonialism, feminism, racism, but all the –isms end up only as truisms.


All in all, this could have been fabulous has the premise been executed without resorting to so many stereotypes. Then again, it’s just 37 pages long, so I didn’t waste much time with it.

A no from me, unless you are a Westerner attracted to the exotic setting and the mild white-saviour vibes.

This standalone story is currently available free to Amazon Prime subscribers.

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