- Broken Base: The book has a very mixed reception. Some think it's a beautiful Coming of Age Story, while others think the story is too depressing to care about.
- Complete Monster: The Sultan of Wanatolia, bored with his thousand wives, abducts the talented underage prostitute Dodola and challenges her to please him for seventy nights in a row, threatening her life if she doesn't succeed. When she fails on the last night, he locks her in cell for seven months and rapes her during a visit. He gives her a second chance with an impossible task: turning a jug of water into gold in a time limit of seventy months. When the girl searches for a solution in the library, he has the librarian beheaded for allowing a woman there. He reacts with a Lack of Empathy when Dodola announces the death of their son, and proceeds to rape her again. When Dodola succeeds the challenge playing on Exact Words, he has her executed anyway. At this moment, we learn that he regularly drowns his wives in the river when they become too old.
- Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: The story is set in a rather unflattering imagining of the Arab world in which men are almost universally savage brutes who rape and oppress women with impunity and seem to have no qualms about pedophilia. To make matters worse, the heroine has very little agency of her own and spends most of her time getting pulled from one melodrama to the next.
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