The Last Tale of the Flower Bride
Chokshi crafts a rich, luxurious, and utterly decadent Gothic fairytale about the nature of friendship and love ... Though the plot of the book is certainly propulsive... The Last Tale of the Flower Bride is, at its heart a story driven by its characters and the complex relationships between them ... Chokshi’s prose drips with lush descriptions and memorably crafted imagery, all mixed with the sharply written observations about human nature that characterize the best sorts of folktales.
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The story is initially bewildering to readers, almost opaque in its structure and mystery. Chokshi wants readers as mystified as the Bridegroom and as entranced as Azure while she embraces the full range of darkness common in gothic fiction ... Beautiful prose, complicated characters and terrible discoveries will captivate readers until the chilling end.
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Chokshi’s novel is a true fairy tale, both in its poetic, fantastical imagery and its thematic interest in the price people pay for freedom and love. The parallels between the bridegroom and Azure as mere mortals faced with Indigo’s impossible privilege, and the connection between Indigo and Azure as young girls enamored with creating their own magic, make the tension bubble higher and higher until it boils over. And as in the best folktales, the issues at the crux of the otherworldly struggles here are simply, and painfully, human.
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