The Jasmine Throne Review | Tasha Suri | Is It Worth Reading?

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Verdict: A World Fantasy Award winner with some of the richest worldbuilding in modern epic fantasy and a genuinely charged sapphic slow burn, undercut by a first volume that is largely setup for the two that follow.

Best for: Readers who want Indian-epic-grounded high fantasy with an anti-colonial spine and a maidservant-and-princess dynamic, and who are happy to wait three books for a resolution.

Heat level: ★☆☆☆☆ (1/5 — romance.io’s “glimpses and kisses”; closed door, kissing only)

Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.9/5 — a 4.09 Goodreads average across 41,684 ratings, with a well-organised minority report about the plot)

Tropes: Enemies to lovers, class difference, forbidden love, caretaking, political intrigue, royalty, chosen one subversion, slow burn, queer awakening, multiple POV.

The Jasmine Throne is Tasha Suri’s fourth novel and the first of the Burning Kingdoms trilogy, a work of high fantasy published by Orbit on 8 June 2021, set in the Parijatdvipan Empire and the subjugated vassal state of Ahiranya, and built on the collision between Priya — a maidservant who survived a temple massacre nobody was supposed to survive — and Malini, an imperial princess imprisoned in that same ruined temple by a brother who intends to burn her.

It holds a 4.09 average across 41,684 Goodreads ratings and a 4.16 across 19,821 StoryGraph reviews, and it won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 2022, beating a field that included A Master of Djinn and Black Water Sister. The averages sit on top of a split that is unusually articulate about structure rather than taste. Both halves of that split are worth understanding before you start.

What Is The Jasmine Throne About?

This is epic fantasy with a colonial argument rather than a romance with dragons in it, and the distinction sets your expectations correctly. Ahiranya is an occupied country whose religion has been suppressed, whose people are dying of a magical rot the empire refuses to treat, and whose sacred site was destroyed with its children inside it. The magic system is not decoration — it is the thing the empire took, and every act of using it is an act of resistance. Suri draws on ancient Indian epic rather than the usual pseudo-European furniture, and readers consistently name that as the reason the world feels like a place rather than a set.

Priya is introduced through what she hides: she is a maidservant in the regent’s household who buys medicine for rot-struck children and does not tell anyone she can still hear the temple. Malini is introduced through what she assumes — that everyone is a tool, that she can calculate her way out of a locked room, and that a servant is beneath noticing. The novel runs through several third-person viewpoints, two of them primary, and that ensemble structure is both what gives the politics their weight and the single most common thing readers complain about.

What Makes This Sapphic Epic Fantasy Work

• The worldbuilding: The most-praised element by a distance, and the reason 87% of StoryGraph readers mark the book adventurous. Readers repeatedly note that the mythology is integrated rather than explained.
• The power dynamic: A maidservant caring for an imprisoned princess is a setup where every kindness is also leverage, and the novel never lets either woman forget it.
• The anti-colonial spine: The rot, the burnings and the suppressed faith are all one argument, and it gives the political chapters stakes that court intrigue usually lacks.
• The prose: Starred by Publishers Weekly, Booklist and BookPage, with dialogue singled out as unusually sharp for the genre.
• The women across the ensemble: Bhumika is the character readers most often say they underestimated, and the novel is genuinely interested in what it costs women to want power at all.

Book Synopsis

Priya works in the household of the regent who governs Ahiranya for the empire, fetching and carrying and keeping her head down. She also, quietly, buys sacred wood for children dying of the rot — a disease that turns people into something green and growing — because she remembers a time when her country could have healed them. What nobody knows is that she was one of the temple children, and that she got out.

Malini, sister to the Emperor Chandra, has refused to burn herself alive for the glory of the empire. Her brother’s answer is to drug her and shut her in the Hirana, the ruined temple above the city, with orders that she is not to leave it alive. When Priya is assigned to attend her, both women see an opportunity: Malini needs someone who can climb the temple and carry messages, and Priya needs to get back into a building that has been forbidden to her since childhood.

Each is using the other and both of them know it. The question the novel spends its second half on is what happens when the calculation stops being the only thing there — and whether a woman who wants to free her country and a woman who wants to take an empire can want the same thing for more than a season.

My Review

The world is the reason to read this, and Suri does something harder than inventing one: she builds a fantasy country whose central wound is occupation and then refuses to let the magic be neutral about it. The rot is a colonial disease. The temple is a crime scene. The deathless waters are the thing the empire could not take. Every element that would be set dressing in a lesser book is doing argumentative work here, and it is why so many readers describe the setting as lush without meaning merely decorative.

The second strength is the specific shape of the romance. Priya and Malini meet as jailer-adjacent servant and captive princess, which means the relationship starts with an unequal transaction and stays honest about it for a very long time. Malini is manipulative because manipulation is the only tool she has been left; Priya knows she is being handled and lets it happen because she wants the temple. The slow burn works because the novel refuses to pretend either woman is innocent, and the payoff is a handful of scenes that carry more charge than most explicit ones on this list — at a 1/5 heat rating.

Where it struggles is plot, and this is the dominant complaint rather than a private impatience. The recurring reader phrase is that this is a prologue rather than a novel: across roughly 576 pages the book establishes the factions, the rot, the temple backstory and the succession crisis, and defers the war it has been building toward to book two. Stacked on that are two secondary problems the three-star reviews return to: the viewpoint count, where readers report losing momentum every time the narrative leaves Priya and Malini for Rao or Ashok, and a marketing mismatch that is worth naming because it is so common. The book was sold on a line about morally grey women who want to burn an empire; a lot of readers arrive expecting villainy and find two broadly sympathetic protagonists making defensible choices, and they feel misled rather than disappointed.

The expectation worth resetting is heat. This appears on sapphic romance lists constantly and romance.io files it at 1/5 for a reason — it is closed door, kissing only, and the author has confirmed as much in reader Q&A. If you came for a fantasy romance with on-page scenes, calibrate now. If the words epic fantasy made you worry the queerness would be a subplot, relax: it is the central relationship of the trilogy and it is on the page from early on.

My honest note: A five-star world and a three-star plot in the same volume, rescued by a central dynamic that genuinely earns its slow burn. If you read fantasy for immersion and politics, this is one of the best things in the last decade; if you need a self-contained arc, start it knowing you are committing to three books.

Element	In The Jasmine Throne
Central relationship	Priya & Malini — an Ahiranyi maidservant and an imprisoned imperial princess, each using the other
Core tropes	Enemies to lovers, class difference, forbidden love, caretaking, political intrigue, slow burn
Setting	The Parijatdvipan Empire and occupied Ahiranya — a secondary world drawn on ancient Indian epic
Heat level	1/5 — romance.io’s “glimpses and kisses”, closed door throughout
Series	The Burning Kingdoms book 1 of 3 — trilogy complete as of The Lotus Empire (2024)
Content notes	Execution by burning and immolation, graphic violence and gore, torture, forced drug use, body horror, self-harm and suicidal ideation, misogyny, familial abuse, war

How Spicy Is The Jasmine Throne?

A 1/5. romance.io catalogues it as “glimpses and kisses”, and that is exactly right: the romance does not go beyond kissing anywhere in the book, and Suri has confirmed it in reader Q&A. StoryGraph’s community warnings do not list sexual content in any tier, which is a useful cross-check — the graphic tier is fire injury, violence and death instead. What the book does deliver is a great deal of charged proximity, and readers who normally want open door report not missing it here, because the tension is doing the work.

The element worth flagging in advance is burning. Immolation is the empire’s signature punishment, it recurs throughout, and it is described. StoryGraph puts fire and fire injury at the top of the graphic tier, above violence and death, which is unusual and tells you where the distress sits. No reviewer flags anything beyond that. For the same restrained band on this site, Gideon the Ninth and This Is How You Lose the Time War both sit at 1/5 — all three prove how much a sapphic novel can generate with almost nothing on the page.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you want fantasy worldbuilding that carries an argument, you like political manoeuvring where the women are the manoeuvrers, you can commit to a trilogy, and you find restraint more charged than description.

You may want to skip it if: you need a self-contained plot in book one, rotating viewpoints away from your favourites frustrate you, you were promised morally grey and will feel cheated by broadly sympathetic leads, or you want on-page heat.

In short: the best-built fantasy world on this list, in the volume that spends most of its time building it.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (August 2026)

The state of the discourse here is unusually clean, because the trilogy is finished. The Jasmine Throne (2021), The Oleander Sword (2022) and The Lotus Empire (2024) are all out, which removes the single largest source of anxiety around this book and changes how people recommend it — the advice has shifted from “start it and hope” to “read all three.” The World Fantasy Award win in November 2022 is now the primary marketing hook and has pulled in a steady stream of readers from general epic fantasy rather than from sapphic lists. BookTok drove the original spike and still supplies new arrivals. There is no screen adaptation announced. One thing the reception does not have: a substantive professional reservation. Publishers Weekly, Booklist and BookPage all starred it and none of the trade notices we could reach raised a criticism, so every negative finding below comes from readers.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): Worldbuilding comes first and comes up most, and the recurring word is lush — usually attached to a note that the Indian-epic grounding is integrated rather than infodumped. Second is the prose, with dialogue singled out more often than description, which is rare for epic fantasy. Third is the central dynamic itself, described as intense and tender in the same breath, and the maidservant-and-princess power imbalance is the specific thing readers name. Fourth is the anti-colonial and feminist argument — readers respond strongly to a book where magic and occupation are the same subject and where the demonisation of women who want power is explicitly the theme. Fifth is the supporting cast, and Bhumika in particular. The minority view that cuts against the main complaint is worth flagging: a substantial group argues the slow first volume is the reason the trilogy lands, and that readers who bounced off book one and quit missed the payoff the setup was for.

What readers argue about and complain about: That it is a prologue, above everything. The mechanism is specific — the imperial war the book spends 576 pages arranging does not happen in this volume, so readers who came for plot experience the whole thing as preamble, and the complaint clusters in the three-star reviews rather than the one-star ones. Viewpoint bloat is the second theme, and it has a precise trigger: the chapters that leave Priya and Malini for the male viewpoints are where readers report their attention going, with one reviewer calling those sections dressing on the two POVs that matter. Third, and the most avoidable: the marketing. The book was sold on morally grey lesbians who want to burn down an empire, and a real contingent of one and two-star reviews are essentially complaints that neither lead is villainous enough to match the pitch. Fourth is romance under-delivery, which usually co-occurs with the third — slow burn plus closed door plus long separations means the relationship is mostly longing and manoeuvre. Fifth, least frequent: that the world outpaces the characters, and the leads are thinner than the country they live in. StoryGraph’s numbers show the character question is genuinely contested — 79% report strong development, but only 66% call the cast loveable with 28% choosing complicated.

The series question everyone should ask first: Book one resolves its immediate situation and ends on a hopeful, bittersweet note rather than a cliffhanger — Malini’s position is transformed, Priya’s is transformed, and the two of them are left on opposite sides of a political line rather than in danger. But the romance does not resolve here and is not meant to. The trilogy is complete, all three books are available, and the sequels rate close to book one on Goodreads rather than falling away, which is the useful thing to know: this is not a series that collapses in volume two. If you are cliffhanger-averse you are safe starting it; if you are commitment-averse, be honest with yourself that this is roughly 1,700 pages.

The audiobook is narrated by Shiromi Arserio and runs a little under twenty hours from Hachette Audio, and she handles the Ahiranyi and Parijati name-sets and registers cleanly, which matters more than usual in a book with this many viewpoints.

Prefer audio? Listen to The Jasmine Throne on Libro.fm — the audiobook shop that supports independent bookstores.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does The Jasmine Throne end on a cliffhanger?

No. It reaches a real stopping point — hopeful and bittersweet rather than suspended — with the political situation transformed and the two leads separated by circumstance rather than left in peril. The romance is not resolved, but that is deferral rather than a cliffhanger.

How explicit is it?

A 1/5. romance.io files it as “glimpses and kisses” and the romance does not go past kissing anywhere in the book. StoryGraph’s community warnings do not list sexual content at all; the graphic tier is fire injury, violence and death.

Is the sapphic relationship the main plot or a subplot?

Central. Priya and Malini are the two primary viewpoints and their relationship drives the political plot rather than decorating it, though the book rotates through several other perspectives along the way.

Is the trilogy finished?

Yes. The Jasmine Throne (2021), The Oleander Sword (2022) and The Lotus Empire (2024) complete the Burning Kingdoms, and the sequels hold their ratings rather than dropping off.

Did The Jasmine Throne win any awards?

It won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 2022. It was also a Locus Award finalist and a British Fantasy Award shortlistee, losing both, and a Goodreads Choice nominee. It was not a Lambda Literary finalist.

Do I need to read Tasha Suri’s other books first?

No. The Books of Ambha duology — Empire of Sand and Realm of Ash — is a separate world with no connection to this one.

If You Loved The Jasmine Throne, Read These Next

Try The Priory of the Orange Tree for the same appetite for enormous secondary-world politics with a sapphic pair at the centre, at a similar restraint; A Memory Called Empire for court intrigue where the colonial argument is the plot rather than the backdrop; and Gideon the Ninth for a very different book that shares this one’s trick of making a charged relationship do the structural work. More across our Book Reviews and on our sapphic fiction list.

The Bottom Line

The Jasmine Throne set out to build an occupied fantasy country and put two women at the centre of what happens to it, and three things carry it: worldbuilding grounded in Indian epic that argues rather than decorates, a power imbalance between servant and princess that the novel never softens, and prose good enough to draw three starred trade reviews. Three things hold it back: a first volume that defers its own war, a viewpoint count that dilutes the two people readers came for, and a marketing promise of moral greyness the book does not keep. If you want the most substantial fantasy world on this list and you are ready for three books, it earned its World Fantasy Award. Check The Jasmine Throne on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

We rank The Jasmine Throne at 3.9/5 — an award-winning world and a superb central dynamic, in a volume that spends most of its length getting into position.

The Evidence Scorecard

Overall ★★★★☆ 3.9/5

• ✓ 4.09 average across 41,684 Goodreads ratings
• ✓ Winner, 2022 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel
• ✓ Starred by Publishers Weekly, Booklist and BookPage
• ✓ A fifth of readers call it setup rather than story

Romance ★★★★☆ 3.7/5

• ✓ Servant-and-captive dynamic keeps the power visible
• ✓ Slow burn built on mutual, acknowledged use
• ✓ Central to the plot rather than a subplot
• ✓ Unresolved in book one and mostly longing

Characters ★★★★☆ 4/5

• ✓ 79% of StoryGraph readers report strong development
• ✓ Bhumika is the most-praised supporting figure
• ✓ Women across the ensemble get real motives
• ✓ Only 66% find the cast loveable, 28% say complicated

Writing ★★★★☆ 4.4/5

• ✓ Three starred trade reviews, no professional reservation found
• ✓ Mythology integrated without infodumping
• ✓ Dialogue singled out repeatedly by readers
• ✓ Some readers say the world outpaces the leads

Emotional Impact ★★★★☆ 4/5

• ✓ 58% of StoryGraph readers mark it dark, 46% tense
• ✓ The burnings land as horror, not spectacle
• ✓ Restraint makes the few romantic beats hit hard
• ✓ Only 53% mark it emotional, low for the hype

Heat Level ★☆☆☆☆ 1/5

• ✓ romance.io files it as glimpses and kisses
• ✓ Author confirms the romance stops at kissing
• ✓ StoryGraph lists no sexual content in any tier
• ✓ Readers expecting fantasy-romance heat are misled

Ending ★★★★☆ 3.8/5

• ✓ A real stopping point rather than a cliffhanger
• ✓ Both women end transformed by their own choices
• ✓ Trilogy is complete, so nothing is left hanging
• ✓ The war it builds toward is deferred to book two

Re-read Value ★★★★☆ 3.8/5

• ✓ Setup reads better once you know what it feeds
• ✓ Dense enough that a second pass finds new politics
• ✓ Rereads are common before each sequel
• ✓ 576 pages of groundwork is a long re-entry

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