I would have loved a better showdown – girl versus creature – and it sort of ruined the whole thing. Even more than that, thinking back as it has been a couple of weeks since I finished A Thousand Nights, I now find myself hating the way things ended. What I didn’t like all that much about the book was the terminology it took a while – like 75% of the book – to get used to things like ‘sister of my heart’ and ‘Lady mother, we must be quick if we are to save your daughter’. And as every new dawn comes, the new queen finds herself growing more powerful, instead of winding up without breath in her body, and finds that she has to deal with her husband, the monster, with both magic and love, if she can hope to slay the demon and save the man. But then Kings are supposed to be just men, and not something without a conscience. Magic is not something that people in our world simply receive – especially humans.

She did not die, and I wondered if I might at last have found a queen for whom I could set the desert on fire. She was not of my kind, yet there was some power to her that was not human, not quite. A Thousand Nights is the story of a girl, who pays the ultimate sacrifice, to save the person she cares about the most in the world. A Thousand Nights has this gorgeous setting, in a desert in the time of camels and tents, with stories told about myths and the king that kills his brides.

A Thousand Nights by E.K. Johnston