This book is brilliant, shining like a flake of its namesake stone. Cutting as a razor.

What it's not is beautiful in the typical sense of symmetry and pleasing form.

The language keens a banshee wail - wonderful and terrible. It attacks the reader by depicting the violent - often brutal - life on a fantastical desert peninsula in a three cornered dance of power, politics, and passion. It shows rape and slavery with an unflinching gaze, stone-like with its lack of compassion, even as we're given a glimpse of life among the dunes and palaces in this far off, but perhaps familiar world.

And therein lies its power.

The characters scintillate on the page, roaring at you with their darkest desires and dearest hopes. The narrative slowly exposes the world like the unfurling rind of a pomegranate that reveals the blood red seeds held in a supporting layer of culture, myth, and prophecy. The plot unravels slowly at first, picking up speed and heat like an Egyptian dancer's diaphanous veils, hinting at what lies beneath with each roll of the shoulders and ting of the zills.

Hidden behind the darkness and bloodshed, we find glimpses of humanity, of love, of passion - even beauty, but always contrasted with the harsh realities of life in the White Desert.

Highly recommended.