THE JASMINE THRONE
Royal flushed
Tasha Suri kicks off a new, India-inspired fantasy trilogy.
RELEASED OUT NOW! 592 pages | Paperback/ebook/ audiobook
Author Tasha Suri Publisher Orbit Books
You don’t get much romance in epic fantasy. What with all the trekking and questing and world-saving, there just isn’t time for meet-cutes or pining or cataloguing every not-soaccidental arm brush. Right? Wrong, says the opening volume of Tasha Suri’s follow-up to her award-winning Books Of Ambha duology; in fact, why can we not have both?
In this lush fantasy version of medieval India, an imprisoned princess can take on an evil emperor and also make space in her schedule to ogle her maidservant’s excitingly muscly arms. Said maidservant can be both a secret acolyte of powerful, forbidden magic and still sometimes forget how to breathe when she makes eye contact with
Strong-willed characters in a high-stakes environment
the infuriatingly attractive princess she’s guarding.
Malini and Priya are (to put it mildly) prickly, strong-willed characters in a high-stakes environment; both are slow to trust and prepared to suffer, and inflict suffering on others, to achieve their goals. They’re also on opposite sides of a stark social divide, and not just because the former is a princess and the latter her servant.
Malini’s brother Chandra is the aforementioned evil emperor, an abuser with a penchant for burning women alive; he exiles Malini after she refuses to be immolated (not unreasonably, you’d think) for the small matter of trying to overthrow him. Priya, meanwhile, belongs to the Ahiranyi, a people branded as savages and brutally conquered by Chandra’s empire, and when she’s not maidservant-ing, she’s in the anti-empire resistance.
The pair meet when, of all the ruined temples in all the world, Malini just has to be locked up in Priya’s, whereupon Priya is duly assigned to serve the captive princess. It’s annoyance at (almost) first sight, and anyone who’s ever read a romance will be counting down the pages to the apparently inevitable.
But the novel doesn’t rush towards any sort of resolution, instead taking time to explore the colonised society, uncovering a host of compromises, contradictions and fault lines of barely contained violence. Ahiranya’s sacred forest is rotting from within, and so are its angry, oppressed people. The path of true love can hardly run smooth when there are so many bodies in the way.
Suri’s world is a distinctive one; as with the social dynamics, she takes time, too, over food and fabric and the physical feel of the place, making it all the more devastating when the things that have become familiar are wrenched apart. The sacred forest is alive with sights, scents and squelches, and the magic that resides there and in the temple is one that bursts forth from the soil, powerfully imagined: green and lush and with more than a hint of poison.
Ultimately, this is a tale of two people at cross-purposes, who keep expecting to be doublecrossed. Although Malini and Priya share both a mutual attraction and a goal – bringing down the emperor – they don’t see eye-to-eye on either ends or means. One wants a new emperor; the other wants no empire. Will they choose each other, or are some causes bigger than any one individual? The story doesn’t end here, of course, so we won’t know for a while. In the meantime, we recommend you revel in Suri’s strikingly beautiful worldbuilding, complex character dynamics, and fascinating, earthy magic. Nic Clarke
Tasha Suri has two rabbits, Lan Zhan and Wei Ying, named after the lead characters in Chinese fantasy series The Untamed.