ricarda_reads 's review for:

The Isle in the Silver Sea by Tasha Suri

3.5

adventurous emotional hopeful reflective medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

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2025 is truly the year of the lady knights and Tasha Suri wrote an appropriate tale for the occasion. She really captivated me with the concept of a magical Isle shaped by endlessly repeating tales, and it ultimately must be one of the most imaginative stories I've read all year. It's a world where some people are born as incarnates, which means that they will take on a role in a tale at some point in their lives. Their fate is set, however tragic it may be, as the tale forces itself onto its characters, feeding the eternal Isle in the process. Vina and Simran are reincarnations trapped in the Tale of the Knight and the Witch, a story that has had them madly in love and dying at each other's hand for hundreds of years now. The old tale starts playing out once again, but it is during a time of many changes. Someone impossibly kills incarnates, causing old tales to vanish and therefore damage to the Isle. It is also unusual that the knight and the witch are not of pureblooded Isle descent, and so both Vina and Simran mark a bit of a disturbance in the never-changing ways of the land. They are of course not keen on eventually killing their beloved and would rather prevent the tale from unfolding. But all tales and incarnates are under strict surveillance by the Eternal Queen, and all information is regulated or straight up destroyed. The main plot has a quest-like nature with Vina and Simran setting out to search for answers. They meet supernatural creatures, walk through witchy forests and stumble into faerie bargains. The world is rich with folklore and I loved recognizing familiar stories. I was surprised to see that the book doesn't take place in a medieval setting, but it didn't bother me too much and it was a good way to include more modern themes. I also expected it to be more romance heavy, but Vina and Simran's relationship turned out to be one of the least convincing parts of the story for me. It's not exactly instalove, but most of their attraction relies on their past lives together and their connection through the tale, and that just didn't make me as excited for their current selves.

It's a book about breaking an eternal cycle, about rewriting one's fate, about bringing change to a world stuck in the past. It's an ambitious story and I'm sure it was hard to find the right way of telling it. The book felt really long in a way that I wished for it either to be shortened or to be drawn out into a series. There were some episodes that made me question their function in the overall story, because I just couldn't detect any progress. Then there's a big time jump in the second half of the book and it was really unsatisfying to say the least. All the characters are put into new surroundings, and it was exhausting to basically start the story all over again after already reading for a long time. I have no solution for the problems I had with this book, so maybe that's why they didn't dim my reading experience too badly. I was reading with great interest and I'm still in awe of the fantastical world that Tasha Suri created here. 

Huge thanks to NetGalley and Little, Brown Book Group UK / Orbit Books for providing a digital arc in exchange for an honest review.