Imagine, if you will, that you pick up a book with the express understanding that it is about a woman, but when you open to its first pages you are met with a decidedly masculine voice telling you about the role of women in stories and society. You might double-check the cover only to confirm that you are, indeed, reading the correct book. You continue reading as confusion and trepidation slowly set in; the scribe tells you that women’s stories are expected to come to an end, if they are told at all, with the arrival of a man to grant her happiness or motherhood before she is consigned to fade into obscurity.  

Now imagine that this masculine voice surprises you once again by telling you that the tale you are about to read is anything but a half-faded echo of yet another forgotten woman, but rather the story of a woman made legend, and instead of letting his own biases cloud and reshape the story, he will let the woman tell her story on her own. 

Such is the beginning of Shannon Chakraborty’s The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi. Set around the twelfth-century Indian Ocean, the novel follows the story of Amina al-Sirafi, a pirate turned parent who is living out her retirement in reluctant peace on the coast of Yemen with her mother and daughter.  

Her peace is soon interrupted, however, by the arrival of a woman named Salima, who petitions Amina to set back out to sea on one last quest to help find her missing granddaughter. Amina refuses until she discovers that Salima is the mother of one of her late crewmates with whom Amina has a complicated past, making the missing girl her crewmate’s daughter. Tempted by the promise of vast riches that would ensure a better life for her daughter and a mixture of responsibility and guilt towards her former crewmate, she decides to leave her own family behind for one last job involving sea monsters, foreign sorcerers, and a grand adventure. 

Chakraborty is a white Muslim convert who originally intended to be a historian before shifting her focus to writing. Her knowledge and passion for history bleeds into the pages of the novel, as she very ambitiously states in the author’s note that she wanted to write a work that was “completely historically accurate except for the plot.” In an interview with the Reading and Writing Podcast, Chakraborty stated that the novel was originally pitched as Sinbad the Sailor meets Ocean’s Eleven. This idea eventually led to The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, a historical fantasy novel deeply rooted in West Asian history. 

With this meticulously researched historical backdrop, the story centers around motherhood and how to counterbalance the responsibilities of being a mother with more individual ambitions. In a Reddit AMA from September 21, 2023, Chakraborty writes, “I wanted something that reflected how desperately we could love our kids, but still want more for US.” This is palpable in the pages of the book. One of the central struggles that Amina faces throughout her journey is whether she is choosing to leave for the right reasons. There is a continuous inner struggle between whether she is doing it for the money, and by extension, her family’s well-being, or if she is driven primarily by a lust for adventure like the ones she had in her heyday.

Throughout her journey Amina is faced with the reality that if she messes up, she may not return to her family at all. Contending with this while repeatedly asking herself whether she is acting for the right reasons brings the challenging ambivalences of womanhood into the forefront of the story. Her own family implores her to stay and focus on raising her own daughter instead of chasing after somebody else’s. Salima, on the other hand, appeals to her maternal sensibilities and her responsibility to her former crew. These conflicting requests show that Amina is, first and foremost, a mother, but perhaps she could be much more. 

In the story, there is a recurring theme of people, primarily men, who believe her less capable due to her gender, and she has to prove herself more than once despite her storied past. The reluctance to look to Amina as a leader is best expressed in the prologue: “[T]o be a woman is to have your story misremembered. Discarded. Twisted.” Amina is seen to be incapable of accomplishing everything that she has because she is a woman. She must either have had outside help, or assistance from the supernatural. This sentiment rings both true and false, the truth of which I will get to presently. 

For now, I wish to draw attention to the ways in which this is negated. The world Chakraborty has created is filled with capable women. There is Amina herself, of course, but there are also other women such as Amina’s comrade, Dalila. Amina’s crew is inhabited by a diverse cast of characters, but these two women often end up drawing the focus.  

During an interview with the UpperPen Podcast, Chakraborty stated, “I knew I wanted to have a mixed gender crew, but I very much wanted the most dangerous characters in that crew to be the two female characters.” The ‘danger’ of these women primarily shines through, not in their physical prowess, as may often be associated with strength, but rather in their leadership skills and craftiness.  

Amina proves her leadership skills multiple times to win the trust of her crew, and Dalila, referred to as the mistress of poisons, uses her alchemical and apothecarial skills to strike fear into anyone who crosses her path. In addition to these two women, there is also Dunya, the girl that Amina and her crew have been tasked with finding. She is an accomplished scholar, despite being a child of only 16, and is able to use her knowledge of history and the occult to carve her own way in the world. 

Amina and her crew show that true strength does not come from brawn: it does not come from physical, gendered attributes, but rather from something else. Amina’s motivations largely center around her parental feelings towards her daughter and wanting a better life for her. She ultimately realizes that a marriage between her motivations can coexist simultaneously and arrives at a poignant conclusion: “[P]art of me hopes anyway that in seeing me do this, Marjana [Amina’s daughter] knows more is possible. I would not want her to believe that because she was born a girl, she cannot dream.” Placing a middle-aged mother into the role of an action hero grants this conclusion a greater sense of verisimilitude and proves that women do not have to be a footnote in someone else’s story. 

Throughout the novel Amina displays a disdain for the supernatural. Unsurprisingly, given her history with it. Marjana is the result of a supernatural union between Amina and her demon ex-husband Raksh. Amina, a recent Muslim convert when she first meets Raksh, believes her soul to be damned due to her relationship with him, even if she initially knew no better. After sinking Raksh to the bottom of the ocean, Amina has taken it upon herself to raise her daughter in the image of a human, despite her half-demon heritage. This leads to her living a life of constant wariness, sheltering her daughter from the world to the point of detriment. 

When the supernatural enters back into Amina’s life, she does not take it well. She is haunted by the consequences of her actions and wants nothing to do with it. Up to this point Amina has relied on her own sense of strength to get by in the world. When her agency is taken away, and the supernatural is thrust upon her once again it feels like a violation. Against her own wishes she is transformed into something that is more than human, an enhanced version of herself.  

My initial reaction upon reading this was outrage. How can Chakraborty take a woman whose strength stems from her cunning rather than her physical might and reduce her to little more than a super-soldier? The scales fell from my eyes, however, when I realized the parallel between her previous supernatural encounter and this one. The supernatural robs her of aspects of herself that are vital to her identity; first it was her soul, now it’s her humanity.  

To counteract the devastating reality of what is taken from her, both instances also see her gain something in return through her own force of will. Marjana is everything to Amina and, despite believing her soul to be lost, her dedication to raising her daughter untainted by the supernatural shows her maternal strength. She tries to be the best mother she can possibly be; supernatural circumstances be damned.  

When Amina is then transformed, she becomes the antithesis of everything she believes to be right. That she is able to take this tragedy and turn it into a strength is another way in which her tenacity shines through. She clings to the vestiges of her humanity even if she is not human anymore. Paradoxically, this perseverance makes her more human than anything.

Still, I find it a shame that this has to come off the back of the supernatural. The book opens with the scribe making mockery of people who perceive Amina to have had supernatural assistance through her adventures: “she must be a sorceress, because no female could sail a ship so deftly without the use of forbidden magics.” The combination of the rejection and acceptance of the supernatural makes for a mixed drink that leaves a somewhat bitter taste in my mouth. I cannot help but wonder why it is necessary for the focus of Amina’s strength to shift into something unattainable. Although it is a clear sign of strength that she is able to transform her negative experiences of violation into something positive, the meaning starts to go out the window due to the way it is framed. 

At its core, The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi is a story about a mother: a mother who chooses to play the hand she has been dealt for the sake of showing her daughter that women should dream and strive for something more. Grounded in a strong female narrative voice, the novel questions whether women can be the protagonists of their own epics or if the responsibilities of being a woman exclude them from that.  

The relationships between the characters, often punctuated by humor, give the story a charm that few fantasy novels can acclaim. The book comes to a close, and as it does, you once again behold the cover as you might have done when you first started reading, the confusion and trepidation you experienced all but gone on the wind. Instead, it is replaced with an understanding. An understanding that this is a novel written by a woman, for women. The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi is far from flawless, but Chakraborty has crafted a narrative that shows a different side of the action hero – a side that works because Amina is a woman, not in spite of.