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Reading: Empire of Sand
Apr. 19th, 2020 09:16 pmTasha Suri's Empire of Sand is a fantasy set in a world inspired by Mughal India. Mehr, the heroine, is the sheltered daughter of a provincial governor, but her mother was Amrithi, from a marginalised and persecuted race who live in the province's vast desert and claim descent from the daiva, elemental beings themselves said to be descended from the gods. When Mehr's Amrithi power of manipulating the forces of the desert's storms comes to the attention of the Emperor's mystics, she has to leave her home and is taken to the temple of the Maha, the chief mystic, where her powers will be used to support the Maha's manipulation of the Empire's sleeping gods to ensure his will is done.
On the face of it, the plot of Empire of Sand is a fairly common one; the story of the princess cast out from her home and forced into a life of servitude. It's differentiated from other stories of the same type both by its non-European setting, and by Mehr herself; from the start, she is acutely aware of her own privilege, and she wins through not by being good and kind and patient, but by being skilled at manipulating other people to her own advantage, something which is not normally seen as a positive trait in a heroine. I found it an engaging read with really interesting worldbuilding, and a really rather sweet romance subplot, although in places it was a lot darker than I'd expected it to be and I'm not sure it was actually quite what I wanted to read at this precise point in time.
On the face of it, the plot of Empire of Sand is a fairly common one; the story of the princess cast out from her home and forced into a life of servitude. It's differentiated from other stories of the same type both by its non-European setting, and by Mehr herself; from the start, she is acutely aware of her own privilege, and she wins through not by being good and kind and patient, but by being skilled at manipulating other people to her own advantage, something which is not normally seen as a positive trait in a heroine. I found it an engaging read with really interesting worldbuilding, and a really rather sweet romance subplot, although in places it was a lot darker than I'd expected it to be and I'm not sure it was actually quite what I wanted to read at this precise point in time.
