Look Like the Innocent Flower, Kill Them With Your Blossoms: The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri

I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

The Jasmine Throne (Burning Kingdoms, #1) by Tasha Suri
Representation: Cast of colour, sapphic MCs, F/F or wlw
on 10th June 2021
Genres: Queer Protagonists, High Fantasy
ISBN: 0356515648
Goodreads

Author of Empire of Sand and Realm of Ash Tasha Suri's The Jasmine Throne, beginning a new trilogy set in a world inspired by the history and epics of India, in which a captive princess and a maidservant in possession of forbidden magic become unlikely allies on a dark journey to save their empire from the princess's traitor brother.

Imprisoned by her dictator brother, Malini spends her days in isolation in the Hirana: an ancient temple that was once the source of the powerful, magical deathless waters — but is now little more than a decaying ruin.

Priya is a maidservant, one among several who make the treacherous journey to the top of the Hirana every night to clean Malini’s chambers. She is happy to be an anonymous drudge, so long as it keeps anyone from guessing the dangerous secret she hides.

But when Malini accidentally bears witness to Priya’s true nature, their destinies become irrevocably tangled. One is a vengeful princess seeking to depose her brother from his throne. The other is a priestess seeking to find her family. Together, they will change the fate of an empire.

{ "@context":"https://schema.org", "@type":"Review", "datePublished": "2021-06-08T10:13:00+00:00", "description": "I still get chills just thinking about it. The subversiveness. The pure fucking cleverness and originality. The deceptively subtle brilliance of it all. \n\nWow.", "publisher": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Every Book a Doorway" }, "url": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/look-like-the-innocent-flower-kill-them-with-your-blossoms-the-jasmine-throne-by-tasha-suri\/", "itemReviewed": { "@type": "Book", "name": "The Jasmine Throne (Burning Kingdoms, #1)", "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Tasha Suri", "sameAs": "" }, "isbn": "0356515648" }, "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Siavahda", "sameAs": "https:\/\/everybookadoorway.com\/" }, "reviewRating": { "@type": "Rating", "ratingValue": 4.5, "bestRating": "5" }} Highlights

~Nature magic is not soft and gentle
~WET SARI SCENE
~family is complicated
~that which yields is not always weak
~Look like th’ innocent flower/But be the serpent under ‘t.
~and while you’re at it, kill them with flowers

The Jasmine Throne is a book that takes our ideas of femininity and power and gentleness…and burns them to the ground.

I think the most obvious example of this is the magic wielded by the ‘temple children’ – survivors of a massacre-by-fire decades ago, blessed by the deathless waters and given abilities not seen for hundreds of years. When I first understood that this magic was nature-magic – a power over plants, specifically – I was actually kind of disappointed, and not very interested. Earth-bending is one thing, but being able to make flowers grow seemed so…gentle. And sometimes gentle magic is exactly what you want, but the characters in this story seemed to need a more dramatic magic, something that could be used for offense, a magic for battle. What good were flowers going to be against soldiers?

A lot, it turns out. They were going to be good for a lot against soldiers, swords, scythes. Suri took my expectations and completely subverted them, and honestly, the entire book is like that.

I’m going to be thinking about the imagery of the rose-bower for a long time, I think.

Part of me simply adores the Jasmine Throne for going against my expectations at every turn, not least in the dynamic between Princess Malini and Priya – if you’re expecting lots of softness and tenderness, you need to go looking for another book, because you won’t find it here. Malini and Priya’s relationship is at once both brutally simple – they both have a use for each other – and infinitely complicated – there are so many layers of want here. But honestly, I’d hesitate to call it a romance. It’s something, something intense, and there’s certainly a sexual element to it…but they never exchange I love yous, and I think that’s very deliberate. I don’t know if it will come later, if their relationship and dynamic will evolve over the course of the series to get to that point, but at least in this first book, I don’t think most of what they feel for each other is what most of us would recognise as any kind of love, romantic or otherwise.

Respect, yes. Desire, sure. But both of them have invested so much of themselves in other objectives, ideals, and missions, that there isn’t really anything left to offer a romantic partner. Not really. And to be honest, I kind of love that. I like that this isn’t a traditional love story, that this isn’t a typical romance. I’m not sure what I expected walking into Jasmine Throne – only that it was going to be mindblowing, because it’s Tasha Suri, so obviously it’s going to be mindblowing – but it wasn’t two women who desire each other, but desire other things more. They’re both too loyal to their ideals or peoples or plans to throw those things over in favour of love.

So, you know, spoilers. This isn’t that kind of love story.

The Jasmine Throne is a love story in the sense of individuals loving their country, their peoples – it’s very much a story about patriotic love, and how different that can look in different people, from different angles (one person’s vision of a perfect future for their country rarely matches everyone else’s). It’s about legacy and history and culture, and colonialism, and how to survive and hold on to your history and cultural identity when a bigger power is trying to destroy it all.

It’s a story about women, fundamentally. I was initially disappointed to find another empire where women can’t wear crowns or sit in the thrones – I prefer stories with more gender-neutral approaches to ruling – but Suri quietly, deftly weaves what I can only call the ‘true story’ that lies behind the public image of the empire, and that true story is one where women rule – even if men don’t realise it. The Emperor is emperor because he’s descended from a specific group of holy women; the regent’s regency has only gone as smoothly as it has because his wife has been playing him all along; the entire political structure of the empire is in the process of shifting because an apparently quiet, biddable, beautiful princess has been writing pretty letters and paying compliments to the right people. The Jasmine Throne is a treatise on traditional female strength; that is, the kind of strength which we consider feminine, which is quiet and pretty and doesn’t look like strength at all. Manipulation through manners rather than brute force. Subtlety over strong-arming. Compliments instead of threats.

And then Suri takes all of that…and says, those whose strength lies in quiet can still roar. Each of her main characters – Priya, Malini, and Bhumika, the wife of the regent responsible for Malini’s captivity and Priya’s employment – exquisitely embody ‘look like th’ innocent flower, but be the serpent under’t’. Malini is no trained warrior, Priya is a handmaiden, Bhumika tends her flowers – and every single one of them is utterly terrifying when they decide to be. Bhumika’s arc probably best embodies this – I have to confess to being one of the many who underestimated her, right up until she decided to show her hand – but it applies to them all. And there’s no way to read this in a way that’s not enormously empowering, that doesn’t make the hair on your arms stand up and give you delicious shivers when Suri decides to spear you with her prose.

The men in The Jasmine Throne are all of secondary importance – even the ones who very much believe the opposite. Which isn’t to say that the women have an easy time of things, or even that they’re all on each other’s side, because they’re not; some of the women in this book may be allies, but just as many oppose them. Women are not a monolith; I would say Suri is careful to avoid that writing mistake, but I suspect that that kind of lazy storytelling would never even occur to her. Every single one of her characters – even down to the most minor – are all too detailed, too carefully created, too real, to make me believe that she’s ever slapdash in her writing.

Anyway.

This is epic fantasy set in a world beautifully drawn from Southeast Asia, with nature magic that rapidly outgrew the pot of my small mind, with a mythology and religions that were just so blessedly strange and new to me. And when push comes to shove, it’s a girl-power book in a way I’ve never seen girl-power done before. I didn’t want to read about gentle, plant-growing magic, but being able to kill with flowers is – if I had to distill The Jasmine Throne down to one image, it would be that one; something pretty and feminine being wielded by feminine people to destroy those that stand against them.

I still get chills just thinking about it. The subversiveness. The pure fucking cleverness and originality. The deceptively subtle brilliance of it all.

Wow.

The Jasmine Throne is probably one of the most hyped books of the year. And believe it or not? It does live up to the hype. It blows the hype sky-high.

It’s out today. You do not want to miss this one.

The post Look Like the Innocent Flower, Kill Them With Your Blossoms: The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.