Review: The Jasmine Throne

The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Meh.

If that review is good enough for you, then don't read any further. For those who require some context of discontent, please proceed.

There are books that get middling reviews because I don't get them and fail to connect to the final product. Then, there are middling reviews when I get it exactly as intended but feel it wasn't particularly good. This is the latter. It's not bad in many ways, but it's also not good in just as many.

Prose-wise, it's fairly good in this department. Everything is correct and written creatively. The writing doesn't become fully engaging, but I feel that isn't the prose's fault. There is plenty of blame to spread around. The characters, for example, are trope and just not that interesting. The book writes in a way that tries to convince you to care about them but fails to understand that this has to happen organically. A reader either cares about the characters or they don't, and no amount of the characters complaining about their feelings/problems will change that.

I think the book's biggest problem is the pacing. It starts too early and feels like it's taking its time. And it's not in a wasting time kind of pacing, but rather a slow burn sort of way. Imagine talking to two people. One takes random pauses because they don't have much to say, and the other speaks slowly, words are pronounced in a long drawn-out fashion, and takes forever to get to the point. This book is the second person.

The sluggish plot seems to be a result of either bad writing or deliberate padding to make a thin story into a book series. Because everything has to be a fucking series/trilogy. Protip: Don't write three books when a novella will do.

To be honest, the southeast Asian influences are the only thing it has going for it. Strip all that out, and you have just another mediocre book in an endless sea of mediocrity. If you get something from it, good for you. Just don't @ me saying it's good, because it's not. It's meh.

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