⚔️🐈‍⬛The Isle in The Silver Sea 🐈‍⬛⚔️

• Tasha Suri

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If I had a nickel for every time I read a tale about a knight and a scribe being incarnated in every lifetime… I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird it happened twice (The Everlasting and the Isle in the Silver Sea).

The Isle in the Silver Sea follows a witch called Simran and a knight called Vina. Some children are born incarnates, which means they are fated to have a role to play in a tale. Think of them as English folkloric stories – Lady Godiva, the Green Man and the like. Simran and Vina’s particular tale is The Knight and The Witch (the Illumicrate edition features this on the naked hardcover, which makes me very happy). And of course, it wouldn’t be a yearning knight book if their tale ended happily. Simran and Vina must try to break the cycle of love and violence that has consumed them for centuries and save the entire Isle in the process.

I would’ve loved to see more world-building. The version of England we were in was very interesting but was never explored to the depth I wanted – it was giving a very medieval vibe, but then bullets were mentioned, so I’m not exactly sure which time period we were in. The magic system, wherein everyone who enters the Isle has their memories of the outside (Elsewhere) world and all its culture completely erased was also incredibly intriguing, and honestly could have been a book in of itself. I also felt like it could have benefited enormously from being a duology; there’s a very obvious divide between Part 1 and Part 2. This way, we could’ve learnt more about the world and given more time for Simran and Vina’s relationship to develop.

However, these complaints aside, Suri’s writing is incredibly atmospheric, and I loved the prose. In summary, this book was full of potential but failed to quite hit the mark for me. However, if you’ve been loving the epidemic of yearning lady knight books releasing this year, I would still recommend this. It has a great cast of diverse side characters – Hari and Galath have my heart. If you were a fan of Our Infinite Fates or This Is How You Lose The Time War in a fantastical setting with sapphic knights…