Fantasy and Science Fiction with unique inspiration points are always interesting to me. So when I heard about a debut novel based on the Living Gods of Nepal, it was easy to make space in my reading life to check it out. It was pretty easily my favorite debut of 2024, and didn’t show any of the shakiness that often plague debut novels.
Read If Looking For: villain stories with actual villains, fire breathing goats, toxic family dynamics
Avoid if Looking For: flashy stories, books where villains are simply misunderstood
Elevator Pitch:
The Scarlet Throne follows Binsa, a teenager who holds the goddess of wisdom inside her. Only she isn’t actually. Instead, she’s got a demon who gives her enough power to fake it while the actual goddess is … well actually she has no idea where the goddess is, or if the goddess is even real. And with her tenure as host of the ‘goddess’ rapidly coming to a close, Binsa is grasping for any way to avoid being thrown out of the temple to scrape by for the rest of her life. And the demon she hosts whispers in her ear. The future is hers, but grasping it will require sacrifice.
What Worked for Me
This book does a phenomenal job of showing a character’s gradual descent into villainy. Binsa’s motivations at the start of the book are more or less reasonable: she’s being set up to marry a random man and live as a housewife without any control or agency for the rest of her life. And the only path she sees to keeping power is through her role as host to the goddess. As the book goes on her actions shift further and further from that goal – though her life circumstances certainly don’t set her up for other paths well – and you gradually lose sympathy for the way that she approaches and rationalizes her decisions. It was really good to see, especially since it avoided some of the more gruesome scenes that I avoid in grimdark books (I can get squeamish). The narrative doesn’t try to shy away from the morality of her actions like lots of villain stories do, and I really appreciated this.
When it comes to worlbuidling and plot, I think both of these were really solid, even if the focus is on Binsa’s character develoment. The book happens more or less within a single building, with trips outside the temple rare – but important – plot moments. In terms of structuring plots, I often am able to see authors manipulating characters in awkward ways to make plot beats work, but Leow’s writing was seamless here. Binsa’s actions were natural results of her situation, and side character’s reactions felt similarly natural and justified.
What Didn’t Work for Me
My primary complaint for this book was that Binsa read as someone in her mid-20s than as a 17 year old girl who has been trapped in a very restrictive (and brainwashy) environment since the age of 10. Her dead mother’s manipulative influence certainly explains part of it, but my difficulty conceiving of Bisa’s narrative voice with her age was one of the major things that made the start of the book a bit rocky. This smoothed out nicely however, and wasn’t a major strike against the book.
Otherwise, I don’t have a lot to complain about here. I’m really excited to see where this goes, and excitedly look forward to the sequels.
In Conclusion: A story about a girl’s descent into villany, with an interesting setting and solid plotting.
- Characters – 4
- Worldbuilding – 4
- Craft – 4
- Themes – 4
- Enjoyment – 4
Marked for Plot 