The Jasmine Throne
Tasha Suri
Value over replacement fantasy
I read Tasha Suri's The Jasmine Throne because it is the first book of her Burning Kingdoms series. Burning Kingdoms is a finalist for the 2025 Best Series Hugo.
It's good. I am not surprised that it is a Hugo finalist. But sadly, it would not be at the top of my list, and I don't even plan to continue reading the series. Borrowing a term from the literature of sports metrics, I would say that The Jasmine Throne is Value over replacement Fantasy. It doesn't break a lot of new ground. It is set in one of the the sort of feudal, warlike, magic-using cultures that fantasies usually inhabit.
Suri, according to her biography, is an Englishwoman of Punjabi heritage and describes her influences thus: "A love of period Bollywood films, history, and mythology led her to write South Asian–influenced fantasy." She gets good mileage out of the Punjab/Bollywood background. The character and plot have a rich lushness that I appreciated. By the end of the novel I was really interested in Malini and Priya, and in knowing what will happen to them. Not interested enough, as I have already confessed, to induce me to read two more entire novels to find out.
It's good, and it was a good use of my time to read this. In the end, I felt about The Jasmine Throne much as I felt about Black Sun, the first book of another series Hugo finalist. That, too, was standard fantasy set in an exotic culture (pre-Columbian America, in that case). It's not enough, not for a best series Hugo, to set your bog-standard fantasy in a more exotic culture.