DAUGHTERS OF THE LAMP

By Nedda Lewers

Cover art: Yuta Onoda (Putnam, Feb 2024)

An immersive adventure filled with vivid characters and brimming with magic.

The book is pitched as Percy Jackson meets Arabian Fairytales, and upon reading for the 9th or 10th time, I would say the pitch holds true. The story has the high-stakes pacing and intrigue of PJ and is deeply rooted in Arabian history and the tales of Ali Baba.

Sahara Rashad lives by logic and always has a plan. There is no room in her life for magic, but when her father takes her to Egypt for the first time to meet her late mother’s family and attend her uncle’s wedding, she soon comes face-to-face with magic she does not believe in and cannot plan for.

First, her cousins claim that the woman her uncle is marrying is a witch. And then her mother’s necklace begins to glow and is stollen. In the process of tracking down her necklace, Sahara discovers a chamber filled with magical objects—Ali Baba’s famed magical treasure, which her grandmother claims the women in her family have guarded for generations. And it’s a treasure that an evil sorceress is hunting.

Sahara must confront her worldview and trust herself and the women who have come before her in order to claim her legacy and protect the treasure.

This book is as steeped in action and adventure as it is universal experience of the search for belonging. Sahara is caught between worlds in many ways: America and Egypt, logic and magic, the present and the past. It’s only by embracing the discomfort and beautifully messy experience of being two things at once that brings Sahara an understanding of the wondrous, unique person that she is.

THE TREASURE

I adore “fantasy with a purpose”, and that’s what this book is. It is a delicious nougat of crispy action-adventure fantasy candy wrapped around a chewy center of deeper meaning and truth. There are a number of gems I could highlight, but the real treasure for me is what drew me to this manuscript in the first place: Sahara herself. Sahara is the conduit for everything in this book—the action, the magic, and the deep themes that speak a universal truth. And it begins with the very first scene of the book. The first lines, in fact:

“Sahara Rashad did not count on luck. Her money—her dollar to be exact—was on logic.”

These two sentences introduce the character, what is important to her, and give her a setting (America) in just a few words. The rest of the scene fleshes those things out through action.

Sahara is at her school festival, determined to best the balloon dart game on this final chance before moving up to junior high. She approaches the game with logic (balloons that are more transparent are filled with more air and therefore more likely to pop), and with planning (she’s brought along her own, sharp dart to use). We see exactly how she views life through her actions. And we see that though she’s grown up at this school, she is also different. A classmate wanders by and makes fun of her foreign-sounding last name. She is American, but she is uniquely Egyptian American.

All of this works to prepare the reader for the promise of adventure. For when Sahara’s friend pulls her into a fortune teller’s tent, the reader is prepared for a conflict of interests. We know the magic of fortune telling will be at odds with what Sahara values and how Sahara views life. Something is bound to happen, because that’s the way stories work. And indeed, when the woman tells her that “The winds of fate approach” and that she must “trust what she cannot see,” we know that Sahara is about to have her logical, well-planned life turned upside down.

It's the promise and the call of adventure.

This is a fantastic opening scene—there’s action that reveals the character, develops her world view, and hints at coming conflict with a promise of a clash of ideals. And it presents the theme: Sahara is different, not quite the same as her other American classmates, a child of two cultures. She needs to learn to trust what she cannot see. She will need to learn to accept who she is.

Action, Conflict, Theme. All shown and developed through Sahara in just one short opening scene. This is how to ground the reader, to invite them in and trust you as a writer so that they will be willing to shut out the world and spend time in your story.

Ways to mine this treasure: does the action of the opening scene present a way to reveal your character’s worldview? Can you look for ways to lean into that worldview, hint at a sense of conflict to come? Are there undercurrents of your story’s theme in how your character responds to the action in the opening scene?