Review: Tasha Suri's THE JASMINE THRONE.

Thanks to the publisher & Netgalley for the complimentary ARC. All opinions provided are my own.

Q: what percentage of your reading would you characterize as fantasy?

I knew from the first pages of Tasha Suri’s The Jasmine Throne, as a pyre was lit for women to be sacrificed on & one woman refused it, that I had stepped into an engrossing & also unsettling book.

Featuring complicated women walking the line between personal survival & wants & what will be best for their people, who are looking to the future even as they feel the weight of their fiery pasts, The Jasmine Throne has a lot to offer readers of fantasy.

In Ahiranyi, an imperial city state of the Parijatdvipa empire, many of the Ahiranyi suffer from poverty & a rot that affects the body. Tensions remain high between Ahiranyi & Parijatdvipa & as the characters are aware, the fact that the Emperor sends his sister, the princess, to be imprisoned there likely won’t help matters.

A maidservant, Priya, is assigned to help the princess Malini. But what Priya doesn’t know is that while the princess is at the mercy of her brother & his whims to some degree, to his fanatic obsession with female purity, Malini is also a master of emotional manipulation. It’s how she’s survived.

& what Malini doesn’t know about her new maidservant is the details of Priya’s past in their prison, where she once lived with Elders & brothers & sisters. What she’s capable of & will be capable of in the future.

Told from many different perspectives, TJT shows how people can be motivated by different reasons for the same things or even just be comfortable working together for different ends. The political machinations are fascinating, & it’s captivating & disturbing to see how far Malini in particular is willing to go.

The portrayal of women is hard-hitting & what it says about women & purpose & desires is particularly moving.

Weighty in page numbers & tone, this read will stay with me for a while & defies my attempt to succinctly describe it in a book review. 

4.5 ⭐️. Release date: 06/08.