The Daughters of Izdihar
Hadeer Elsbai
Hardcover / eBook
ISBN: 9780063114746
Harper Voyager, January 2023, 370 pages

Greetings, readers, and welcome back to another review! This month we’re going to take a look at a book that mixes political machinations, magical mayhem, and quiet struggles to survive in everyday life dominated by a relentless patriarchy—it’s The Daughters of Izdihar, written by Hadeer Elsbai.

Right off the bat I found myself drawn into the premise of the story—two women from vastly different socioeconomic backgrounds, each gifted with the power to change the world around them (via magic, because heavens forbid women change the world on their own and upset the menfolk!), but each trapped within a systemic imbalance that refuses to let them explore who they’re truly meant to be. My initial excitement was only furthered by the setting our dual protagonists (Nehal and Giorgina) find themselves in—a heady melange of three different Egyptian revolutions spanning from 1919 to the Arab Spring protests of the early 2010’s.

First and foremost, I have to point out that this book feels like a love/hate letter from Elsbai to the Egyptian authorities, and after reading it, it’s hard not to agree with her. Themes of government corruption, violent crackdowns, and forcibly arranged marriages war with both the obvious love Elsbai has for her community, culture, and history of one of the oldest cradles of humanity, as well as the desire of people to find a life free from oppression. Both Nehal and Giorgina are gifted with otherworldly powers, but even those aren’t enough to break through centuries of toxic honor and cronyism, no matter how hard each tries.

For Nehal, the struggle is comparatively easier—borne to an upper-class family that’s fallen on hard times thanks to her father’s profligate gambling habits, she exemplifies the privilege of one who has come to the struggle late, but understands at a visceral (and some might say naive) level that fighting is the only answer, and also has the resources to shield her from all but the worst of happenstances. For Giorgina, life is quite crueler. As a younger daughter from an abusive lower-class household, she wants nothing more than to care for her books and find a way to fit in while somehow finding true love, but her contradictory wants match the tumultuous magic buried deep within her soul—and it seems only destruction follows their release. Mix in recently cast-off colonialism, religious fanatics willing to burn down the world to rid it of magic, and a saber-rattling neighbor, and the world these two women have to navigate is both fantastical as well as achingly familiar.

One thing I really enjoyed was the way Elsbai weaves her storyline between the two differing viewpoints of Nehal and Giorgina. Both feel like fully fleshed characters, each with their own distinctive voice, but throughout the course of the book it never felt like two separate stories. While not quite opposing sides of the same coin, Nehal and Giorgina share many similarities. They also carry just as many differences that help bring their world alive with the friction that arises between them. In a delightfully ironic twist, the man between them, Nico, is relegated to a sideline role for almost the entirety of the book, despite being the one closest to the levers of power—a clever upending of the typical male-dominated gaze trope that wars with the obvious patriarchal elements underlying the story.

The other thing I thought Elsbai portrayed really well is the duality of power and helplessness that accompanies revolution. Both Nehal and Giorgina are committed to upending the established order, and both achieve various successes, but each accomplishment is accompanied by a backlash of social and actual violence that leaves them wondering if they’re pursuing the right path. The tension between the protagonists and their families, drawn along multiple fault lines, is just as engaging as the various action scenes that dot the narrative, and all rotate around the shared axis of what a woman’s role in this society is supposed to be.

Overall, The Daughters of Izdihar is a book I could have written another thousand words about and still not done justice to the complexities contained within, which in my view is the sign of an author who knows what they’re doing, and is even more impressive for a debut novel. My only complaint is that I have to wait for the second part of the story to come out to find out how everything ends, but in the grand scheme of things it’s a minor quibble indeed. Go read it.

Read if: You enjoy mashed up political history in your fantasy magic struggle; your favorite day is a quiet afternoon with a new book; you’ve contemplated tearing out the foundations of an unjust system.