An exiled princess and the maidservant hiding forbidden magic ignite a rebellion — and a slow, dangerous love between women.
- Score
- 79.3
- Spice
- 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️Sweet
- POV
- multi
- Ending
- HEA / HFN
Tropes
Content warnings
Curated signals, not an exhaustive guarantee.
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What readers think
Readers consistently praise Suri's extraordinarily vivid prose and the richness of her India-inspired world — the religion, the rot, the botanical magic, and the layered colonial dynamics feel fully realised and unlike anything else in fantasy. The relationship between Priya and Malini is almost universally cited as its greatest strength: deeply felt, morally complex, and built on caretaking and mutual recognition rather than romance-novel shortcuts. The World Fantasy Award win (2022) reflects how seriously critics took the book. Common criticisms focus on the slow first half, the density of the multi-POV structure (7+ perspectives), and the pacing — some readers find the plot deliberately unhurried, which tests patience before the convergent finale. A minority feel the romance resolves less fully than they wanted in book one, though most accept this as earned slow-burn across a trilogy.
Read it if
- · Readers who want sapphic epic fantasy with genuine literary ambition and non-Western world-building at its core
- · Fans of morally grey characters, colonial resistance narratives, and lush atmospheric prose over breakneck plotting
- · Readers who consider The Priory of the Orange Tree or She Who Became the Sun essential reading and want something equally serious
Skip it if
- · You need fast pacing or a primarily romance-driven story — this is a political epic first, with the romance as a slow secondary thread
- · Multi-POV structures with 7+ perspectives and a dense first half frustrate you
- · You want explicit heat or a fully resolved romantic arc by the end of book one
If you liked this
- · For fans of She Who Became the Sun (Shelley Parker-Chan) — morally grey sapphic protagonists navigating empire and identity in a richly non-Western-inspired world
- · For fans of The Priory of the Orange Tree (Samantha Shannon) — literary sapphic epic fantasy with feminist themes, restrained heat, and a slow-burn central pairing
- · For fans of An Ember in the Ashes (Sabaa Tahir) — dual-POV enemies-adjacent romance set against brutal imperial occupation with high political stakes
- · Like Avatar: The Last Airbender but adult — colonial resistance, elemental magic rooted in place and culture, and characters on opposing sides drawn together
In this series
Part of The Burning Kingdoms — read in order:
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