Review: The Last Tale of the Flower Bride by Roshani Chokshi
From the publisher:
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.
But when Indigo learns that her estranged aunt is dying and the couple is forced to return to her childhood home, the House of Dreams, the bridegroom will soon find himself unable to resist. For within the crumbling manor’s extravagant rooms and musty halls, there lurks the shadow of another girl: Azure, Indigo’s dearest childhood friend who suddenly disappeared. 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.
This book is definitely not for everyone. The prose is flowery and cerebral, and the story has a very dreamlike quality. I had to take breaks every now and then to go back and digest what I read, however, because of that I can 100% see this book taught in schools in the future. The story itself is a gothic tale of a man known simply as “The Bridegroom” who believes his wife is a faerie creature and that their story is a faerie tale. This stems from him perceiving how they met and things she has asked of him (like not asking about or looking into her past) as faerie trials. When Indigo gets the news her aunt is dying and they head to her childhood home, her secrets begin to unravel, and he furthers the faerie tale narrative.
The Bridegroom is very academic and his chapters were the ones that needed to be read and deciphered as he tended to talk in metaphor. His wife, Indigo, has no voice of her own and we’re only told about her from his point of view and later on, from the point of view of her friend Azure. The entire cast of characters walk the line between absolutely insufferable and vaguely likable. Indigo is absolutely horrific and when you think she can’t do something worse, she does, and you end up rooting against her, which is probably the point. Indigo’s secret felt super obvious to me, but the overall story was just so hauntingly beautiful, I have to give it four and a half stars.
My rating: 4.5/5 stars. I can’t stop thinking about this book!