The Storyteller's Daughter

"This tale, which you thought so long asleep as to be incapable of offering anything new, has given an unexpected stretch, reached out and caught you in its arms".

The Storyteller's Daughter by Cameron Dokey, is perhaps one of the most well written fairy-tale retellings I've read in the recent past. A tale as old as time itself, The Arabian Nights is a story that has been told many times over, and each retelling carries an echo of the magic that wove the original. Yet this retelling, is different in a way that was never seen before; this tells the story of Sharahzad, the brave queen who challenged her fate to save a kingdom.

"All have heard of the storyteller so gifted with words that she told tales for one thousand and one nights in a row. With her gift, her voice alone, she saved her own life and that of countless others. Through the years, this story has been handed down with never a hint of anything left out. How, then, can what I claim be true? How can there be anything more?"

And yet there is more, so much more. The Arabian Nights is not just a story of a woman brave enough to challenge her destiny and win an empire, it also talks of a storyteller so gifted with her words that she was suspected of being a sorceress, of a king so lost in his ways that he could no longer see his own heart, and of a vengeance that nearly brought down the greatest empire in the world.

"You have felt the tantalizing brush of surprise. And close upon it's heels, so swift nothing on earth could have prevented it's coming, anticipation."

"I know that you are mine now. Or, to be more precise, you are the story's"