Have You Ever Read a Book So Good It Makes You Mad?
Despite reading more than a hundred books a year, most of the time, I read pretty casually. Usually, I can put down a book and not think about it again until I pick it back up. It’s not that I’m reading bad books, but it’s rare that I get fully immersed in a story or have a big emotional reaction—maybe reading this much has set the bar higher.
Every once in a while, though, I’ll encounter a book that reminds me what reading can do. For example, when I read the first few pages of The One Hundred Nights of Hero by Isabel Greenberg and I had to put it down and literally take a lap in my living room before I could calm down enough to keep reading it.
Or when I read The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri and realized it was making me angry that everyone wasn’t talking about this book at all times.
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I know I’m late to the party. The Jasmine Throne is part of the Sapphic Trifecta: three sapphic fantasy novels with orange covers that all came out in 2021. (The others are The Unbroken by C. L. Clark and She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan.) I don’t know what we did to deserve that gift, but each of those is an incredible read.
I often shy away from epic fantasy, because my bad memory makes it hard to follow all that world-building, not to mention the multitude of names and places you’re expected to keep track of. And The Jasmine Throne is pushing 600 pages, so you can see why it intimidated me. Despite all the different points of view we follow and the detail in the world-building, though, I found this surprisingly easy to follow, and I was quickly pulled in.
How can I describe what makes this book so good? For one, the world-building is exquisite. We follow multiple political factions, including several competing strategies for rebelling against the tyrannical ruler. There are three distinct religions, each of which feels fully fleshed out.
And then there are the characters! All of them are morally grey, and even the characters who don’t get a lot of time on the page feel three-dimensional. The main characters manage to be both sympathetic and ruthless. They show how this colonialist rule has forced them to be monstrous or die.
There’s political strategizing and a whole host of questions about where each character draws their line in the sand: Where do your loyalties lie? What are you willing to sacrifice? What is a noble war/battle, and do you care? How far would you go for revenge?
I haven’t even gotten into the sapphic romance or the complex relationships between the siblings. There is so much packed into this book, with high stakes and ambitious world-building, but it also is absorbing and readable.
This is a book that really shows what fantasy can do. It’s the kind of story I wanted to reread before I had even finished it. I’m both excited and terrified to pick up book two, because so much has already happened. I can’t recommend this highly enough.
Have you ever read a book that made you feel like this? Let’s chat in the comments!
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