Somaiya Daud's entrancing YA debut, Mirage, takes place in a Morocco-inspired fantasy world in which 18-year-old Amani is forced into extremely close quarters with her oppressors.
"The occupation is cruel. Its heirs crueler still." The Vathek, led by King Mathis, invaded Andala some two decades ago. Since then, the native Andalaans have suffered, their beliefs and customs declared illegal and their hopes for the future limited. Amani, a member of the Kushaila tribe (the largest and oldest in Andala), has a poet's heart and an ecstatic love for the Kushaila prophetess, Massinia. Inured to the occupation, Amani looks forward to taking her place as an adult in her small farming community. At her coming-of-age celebration, however, a squad of imperial droids abducts her and takes her to the palace. There, she meets the princess, Maram vak Mathis, who has the cruel temperament of her silver-haired, blue-eyed Vathek father and the looks ("brown skin and twisting dark hair and dark eyes") of her Kushaila mother. Horrifyingly, Amani looks exactly like her--which is why she has been abducted. Maram is so despised by the people that King Mathis fears she will be assassinated; he has commanded that Amani risk her own life by acting as his daughter's double.
Daud's Andala is richly described, inhabited by peoples with well-fleshed histories and cultural expressions, the relationship of the occupied with the occupier the spring from which Amani's story flows. In the face of brutality, Amani holds on to who she is and to whom her world belongs. Her connection to her roots and her home only grows the longer she is imprisoned and forced to play Maram, and she begins to truly understand the Kushaila holy book's testament to "endurance and survival": "The blood never dies. The blood never forgets." --Siân Gaetano, children's and YA editor, Shelf Awareness