Book #51 of 2023:
The Last Tale of the Flower Bride by Roshani Chokshi
Based on the lush prose, the flowery title, and the other pieces I’ve read by author Roshani Chokshi, I was expecting this novel to fit squarely in the fantasy genre, but to my surprise, it’s relatively rooted in reality instead. Although the central characters believe in the supernatural, and spend quite a great deal of time trying to invoke certain witchy powers to bend the universe to their will, there’s ultimately nothing here that a straightforward explanation couldn’t account for — more’s the pity. In the absence of true magic, we’re left with a plot twist that’s been done too many times before and several interesting potential pathways that are unfortunately ignored on the way to the predictable end.
It’s hard to discuss a story like this that builds to some big reveal without spoilers, but I’ll try. Part of me worries that even alluding to that sort of structure will tip future readers off, but since I correctly guessed the surprise less than a quarter of the way through the text myself, I’m not too worried about keeping it a secret for others. I will simply note that the book is presented in two alternating timeframes and narrators: a teen girl in the past with a friend who looks and acts close as a sister, and a man in the present-day who’s married to the latter. The earlier thread sees the girls playing darkly violent games of make-believe and developing a toxic codependency on one another; the later one finds the hero struggling with his wife’s insistence that he never look into her personal history, as well as his own conflicted memories about a brother who vanished that his parents maintain was just an imaginary friend.
A lot of the individual scenes are spookily effective, especially at conveying the power that the bare idea of witchcraft can have over a suggestible mind, even without the spells being strictly real in any meaningful sense. It’s got a solid gothic atmosphere and a neat incorporation of the old Bluebeard legend. I would have happily read a whole narrative focused on the ambiguously missing sibling angle alone, and I’m impressed with how the protagonists in both eras deal with their respective significant traumas. And yet, I find that I’m cold on this title overall. It’s too self-congratulatory in its imagined cleverness at setting up that would-be gotcha moment, when I suspect I would have been more invested if that had been front-loaded into the premise instead. Don’t try to dazzle me with something that wasn’t particularly well-hidden in the first place — tell me about it at the beginning, and then let us explore the fallout with eyes open together.
[Content warning for gore, pedophilia, sexual assault, incest, bullying, drowning, and child abuse.]
★★★☆☆
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