The Last Tale of the Flower Bride: The #1 Sunday Times Bestseller

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Which is partly why this book doesn’t really hold up under scrutiny: gothic novels and cautionary tales about murderous husbands don’t usually lend themselves to romantic happy endings. If they do, they make a point of defanging the husband in question, as a way of reassuring their (primarily female) audience that he doesn’t pose a threat to the heroine anymore. But by swapping the gender of her characters, Chokshi subverts this traditional power dynamic without replacing it with a new, more interesting one. Gender-bending a narrative structure that was created to make a point about patriarchy doesn’t work thematically, unless you substitute patriarchy for an equally compelling power structure. The writing is very slow (mainly because of the frivolous embellishments) and I had to force myself to continue. My head refused to co-operate and kept wandering outside the realms of the plot. So Roshani, what is next for you ? Can you share details of any future projects? Will you be returning to adult fantasy in the future? What follows is a story about their friendship and growing up. They want to be with the fae, they believe they are meant to be more than what this world has to offer and Indigo knows without a doubt that they will transcend on the eighteenth birthday. As time passes, Azure no longer wants to be a shadow to Indigo. She wants her own life and Indigo is very much willing to punish her to be herself. I rooted for Azure the whole time. Indigo could have been a great friend but she was missing empathy. She put Azure in danger so many times, like pushing her to the edge of the cliff and holding by the shirt so she won’t fall but still letting her come so close to the end.

As the house slowly reveals his wife’s secrets, the bridegroom will be forced to choose between reality and fantasy, even if doing so threatens to destroy their marriage . . . or their lives. Her writing is pure poetry wrapped up in a coat made of broken dreams and shattered promises; Every line is so impactful, so whimsical I found myself reading passages more than once because I felt like they were uprooted directly from the part of my soul that holds all those lyrical thoughts I can never put into words.We follow a double POV, one in the present and one in the past, and both evolve around a mysterious and beautiful woman named Indigo Maxwell-Casteñada. In the present, we follow the Bridegroom, a young historian who married Indigo, and vowed to never pry into her past. In parallel, we follow Indigo and her best friend when they were teenagers, all of this before the best friend's mysterious disappearance. Once upon a time, a man who believed in fairy tales married a beautiful, mysterious woman named Indigo Maxwell-Casteñada. He was a scholar of myths. She was heiress to a fortune. They exchanged gifts and stories and believed they would live happily ever after–and in exchange for her love, Indigo extracted a promise: that her bridegroom would never pry into her past. They are representative of the best and worst parts of me. What’s sentimental can turn strangling; what’s imaginative can tilt insidious; what’s perceptive can skew paranoid. And like many people, I’m often at odds with myself. A unicorn tapestry of folklore, magic, and monsters, woven with the nimblest hand and the most shimmering gilded thread. Roshani Chokshi is a master of all things baroque, sensuous, and mystical.” many thanks to NetGalley, Hodder & Stoughton and the lovely Roshani Chokshi for the ARC and the opportunity.

I should also mention that this book has a MASSIVE warning for TOXICITY. This made it an uncomfortable read at times, which probably added to my displeasure of reading it this book.

The Last Tale of the Flower Bride

The House of Dreams, which is the setting for much of the plot, is a prominent character in The Last Tale of the Flower Bride . It’s also the primary component of the story’s heavily visual and cinematic qualities. The House’s many rooms and spaces throw red herrings of information at the bridegroom as he attempts to discover what exactly Indigo has hidden within the house. The House of Dreams inclines itself towards its very name, as the House is given dreamlike qualities that don’t quite fit in the real world. You see, nothing good can come from being loved by old gods. Their love of mortals turns them neglectful and petty. When they move on, they lay waste in their path—cicada wings and bear paw prints, sacs of spider silk, echoes and anemone, the limbs of lovers now rendered to stars.” Before we start, how are you all doing? I hope you had a wonderful weekend and got some reading and relaxing done.

Anyway, I’m excited to continue and I’m really curious about The Bridegroom’s brother and how he might come in to play later. I was left with everything and nothing. I was free and forever trapped. I was a multitude of blues.” Azure later realizes that Indigo was not an escape for her, but someone she needed to escape from. The controlling elements of different worlds and one girl’s coming-of-age discovery are intertwined, which truly induces the mystic nature of Chokshi’s writing. Indigo is beautiful, and so is the way Chokshi grants the reader the ability to see what’s going on just before the bridegroom does. There doesn’t seem to be a point where the story loses focus, as it always appears to have the grand plan in mind. When Indigo learns that her estranged aunt is on her deathbed, the couple rush to her childhood home, known as the House of Dreams. Within this huge mansion lie plenty of secrets, and the man finds himself unable to resist the urge to know the secrets of his bride. Will his curiosity end up destroying his marriage, or his own life?I think that is the truest myth that encapsulates marriage. It is the question of whether you can hold on to someone as they're shapeshifting, whether they can hold on to you as you also are shapeshifting. And that was what I wanted to play with in ‘Flower Bride.’ I was very curious about … what would happen when someone wasn't willing to reveal the form that they used to have. What does that do in a marriage, even when there is love?” The curious bridegroom may be at the heart of the story, but he’s not the only focus. Indigo, his wife, is seductive and enigmatic: two words that often go together smoothly, as if the mystery is what makes one attractive. As the reader learns about Indigo through her husband’s eyes, we learn about who Indigo is through the perspective of Azure, Indigo’s childhood friend. These sections take place between the bridegroom’s chapters in discovering what exactly happened between the two girls.

Okay, I LOVED this book! So much more than I ever expected to. However, I suspect it won't be what some readers are expecting, especially if they know Chokshi from her YA novels. I fell head over heels in love with the armospheric way people, places and situations are described, and I loved how the story is peppered with dark and folkloric tales, some old and known, some new and bone-chilling. But she saw something in me. Something that turned her kiss into a knife that cut me free from the dark.’ All marriages possess their own tongue.It is a lexicon discovered in that space between clipped sentences. Its poetry can be heard in the rustle of blankets as you shift to curl around the other in silent apology. In this way, I spoke to my wife. I let the slow drag of my thumb along her jaw say what I could not” I’ve been trying to find a way to live in this world. Barring that, I was looking for a way to leave it.”A shimmering tapestry of intertwined fairytales, told through the secrets of a modern Bluebeard’s chamber. The Last Tale of the Flower Bride will enthrall fans of twisty, dark journeys into the secrets of two girls, Indigo and Azure, who are inextricably linked by the perils of a mysterious house where nothing is quite as it seem” A sumptuous, gothic-infused story about a marriage that is unraveled by dark secrets, a friendship cursed to end in tragedy, and the danger of believing in fairy tales–the breathtaking adult debut from New York Times bestselling author Roshani Chokshi. Roshani Chokshi is the award-winning author of the New York Times bestselling series The Star-Touched Queen, The Gilded Wolves and Aru Shah and The End of Time, which Time Magazine named one of the Top 100 Fantasy Books of All Time. Her novels have been translated into more than two dozen languages and often draw upon world mythology and folklore. Chokshi is a member of the National Leadership Board for the Michael C. Carlos Museum and lives in Georgia with her husband and their cat whose diabolical plans must regularly be thwarted. The writing is quite beautiful. Many lines were striking. However, the ornateness of the flowery text bogs down the story as well as the pacing. There’s no balance between the two crucial elements of plot and prose.