The disease's progression can be slowed with the application of sacred wood, but such wood is increasingly thin on the ground, as tree rot spreads unchecked throughout Ahiranya. Outside the walls of the regent’s house, the Ahiranyi people are rapidly falling victim to a disease-cum-effective-bit-of-very-no-thank-you-body-horror called tree rot, in which the bodies of the sufferers turn into trees, kind of. Following the mass slaughter of her temple siblings by the invading empire of Parijatdvipa, she finds work as a servant in the house of the regent, thanks to the good graces of the regent’s Ahiranyi wife, Bhumika. She learns to fight, is “once-born” in the living waters, and possesses a unique bond with those waters. The novel’s protagonist, Priya, begins her life as a temple child of Ahiranya. But still: I finished the first novel in Tasha Suri’s new Burning Kingdoms trilogy, The Jasmine Throne, imbued with that very sense of hope I like to think I’m too savvy to enjoy: hope that a tree inflicted with rot can grow healthy again that a woman silenced can find her voice that a nation subjugated can assert its right to its cultural traditions and its freedom.

I have a cold, dark, shriveled soul and I prefer the second-volume grim sense that all is lost to the first-volume soaring hope-the one that follows an initial victory I already know is only one battle in an ongoing war. If we were going to be reductive and assign people to categories based on which entry in a given trilogy we like the best, I would have to cop to being very solidly an Empire Strikes Back guy.

The jasmine throne by tasha suri