Rating: WARTY!
This is aimed at middle-grade readers and so is not for me. Despite not warming to it myself, I tried to see how it might appeal to a younger reader, but even then it felt like it wasn't up to snuff.
For me it felt confused and cluttered, and the main character went from being put in peril here, to being put in a different peril there, and then yet another one everywhere. It felt like it was far too much, with barely time to take a breather. I know that when you want to entertain young children, there has to be danger, but this felt like it was all danger all the time with no respite, no downtime, and little humor to buoy-up the main participants.
Dalya is of Turkish ancestry and when she gets a chance to travel there with her father (mom is predictably out of the picture), she jumps at the chance to 'reconnect' with him, but he proves just as unreachable there as he is at home. They stay at a largely derelict and old family mansion in Istanbul, which is badly-neglected and unsafe in many regards. Naturally, Dalya disobeys her father's strict instructions to remain on the first floor of the house because upstairs is unsafe, and in chasing a cat she espies, she discovers a bottle of magic ink hidden under a floorboard.
The ink is supplied by a djin, and grants only one wish to each user. Dalya wishes to go home, but instead ends up being sent back in time and turned into a cat - the very cat she was chasing upstairs in the first place. How this happened was never explained, given that her explicitly stated wish was to return home. The cat she becomes is apparently a magical cat, although throughout the story the cat never actually does any magic, which struck me as very curious, and a waste of a good cat to boot. Why give it all the appearance of being magical if it serves no purpose?
In order to return to her human self, and to return to her own time, Dalya must embark upon an adventure through the mythology of Istanbul in quest of the djin who owns the bottle, in order to have her wish revoked. This is all well and good, but these folk tales and animal stories don't resonate well with people who have never heard them before, and it felt like the author was trying to toss in everything but the kitchen sink (although that also appeared in the story, I believe).
I can understand that these things might well appeal to the author and be very meaningful to her, but to me they really felt like a jumble of unrelated ideas that didn't really gel together, and which left me unsatisfied and a bit lost at times, too. I felt it could have been done better. The ending was too predictable. For the intended audience, maybe that's not such a bad thing; indeed, they may well get much more out of this that I did, but I've read many middle-grade stories and really enjoyed a lot of them. This one didn't get there for me and I can't commend it as a worthy read.
