Book Rec: The Isle in the Silver Sea
The Isle in the Silver Sea is a sapphic adult romantic fantasy written by World Fantasy Award-winning author Tasha Suri. Published in October 2025, it takes place in a medieval land fueled by stories, including a knight and a witch fated to fall in love and doom each other over and over, across hundreds of lifetimes. Their current incarnations are two women searching for a way to break the cycle.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
From the moment this sapphic romantasy opens, it unequivocally declares, in an author’s note, that the fairytale is for queer women of color and all other marginalized people. As a Black queer woman, I went into it expecting to herald it for its masterful depiction of Brown and Black characters within a medieval setting and the promised sapphic love story woven into the mystical center of its corrupt Isle’s very heart. How could one expect anything less from the creator of the breakout sapphic South Asian fantasy success, The Jasmine Throne?
This Book’s #1 Strength
However, The Isle in the Silver Sea’s true strength is something readers may not anticipate because it bore so little weight in the book’s marketing: immigration. As the first-generation daughter of two Caribbean immigrants, I had to blink twice to believe it was there myself. And not just there, but also screamed on the rooftops of every page in such a refreshing and unapologetic manner against the backdrop of these worrying times.
‘Perfect’ is an incredibly subjective word that often has no place in literary critique, so believe me when I say I understand the responsibility of my next sentence. Suri perfectly weaves real-world immigration issues into the fantastical world-building of her fairytale universe. The Isle is a land quite literally forged from old tales told over and over again as faithfully as possible to their original iteration. These stories are retold by inhabiting the bodies of their citizens and forcing them to reenact the tragic twists and turns of their fables. If a story is ever lost, it has a disastrous impact on the land of the Isle itself. A cliff, forest, or even an entire village could disappear.
Suri harnesses this fear for the sake of subversion and critique. Weaving it into the hearts of every citizen and using it to guide the corrupt laws that govern the Isle because of people’s unwillingness to face the answers to uncertain but essential questions. In a land that feeds on stories as both a deity and a power source, caught in its whims and machinations, what impact does it have to tell new stories or uplift voices never heard before? Will the land flourish or collapse into the silver sea itself?
The unknown possibility of deviating from the status quo—the stories people are used to hearing, the kinds of heroes they are used to seeing, the tragic endings they are used to expecting—encourages assimilation for the sake of the Isle’s preservation at the expense of accepting new tales. It’s little wonder that this archaic system fails to facilitate joy for the majority of citizens, but it is understood as the cost of survival. Immigrants to the Isle, referred to as “the Elsewhere population,” pay this cost at a much steeper price, because their passage into the safety of the Isle comes at the risk of them being forced to assume one of the stories and lose all memory of their own:
“By the time she had been on the ship from moonrise to sunrise, her memory of home had smeared and faded too, like light and shade through glass. But she remembered fear—muddied brown water, and the sulfur of gunshot. And she knew what her mother had promised her … We’re going to a land of stories, her mother had said. Angrezi stories. Nothing can touch us there. We can start again. Why climb on a ship that shouldn’t exist, and cross a shining sea to an alien and magical land, if not for that? Safety. A future. You cannot be hurt by stories that do not own you. You can live among them, a stranger and an outsider, the birth tales that made you fading like ash, and you can survive” (pp. 23-24).
Possible Worries and Concerns
Despite my praise for Suri’s handling of immigration and her decision to make one of the two main characters an immigrant herself (Simran), I don’t want to overlook problematic elements. The book, while purporting to uplift women, falls into three traps that so many other women-led works, consciously or unconsciously, do:
Saying disparaging comments about men as though it’s meant to be empowering to women: “Blaming the lads for being useless was like blaming water for being wet” (p. 32).
Showing a “strong” woman protagonist (Vina) who performs casual sexism against other women: “Godsblood, you sleep with a man’s sister once, and he’ll truly never forgive you” (p. 33).
A lack of chemistry between the two women/femme love interests, while their bonds with men seem to feel much stronger and deeper: “You had to flirt with the thief, didn’t you? Had to show off and try and get into her knickers, and look where we are now” (p. 32).
Bringing It Home
Despite these shortcomings, The Isle in the Silver Sea has pieces that are greater than the culmination of its parts. If readers have the bravery and the grace to crack through the surface of this work and investigate its strengths, they will find a core that celebrates two queer women of color’s investigation of their exploited roles in a dominant culture. One that would prefer to keep them trapped in a never-ending tale of misery, just to fuel the wealth and prosperity of their ‘precious’ Isle.
This divide is incredibly relevant to the book’s queer, fandom-loving target audience, as it can mirror online and IRL discourse between the value of canon versus non-canon retellings (fanfics, fan art, fanzines, and more). Queer stories often find life within canon stories diverged, and the criminalization of these divergences in the Silver Isle echoes the oppression many queer readers of color face both by exclusion from the works they love and rejection from their fellow fandom members—who are often white, cisgender, heterosexual, and/or brimming with unchecked audacity. Suri’s medieval tale fights against this resistance to their—our—existence both in everyday conversations and the tales we choose to remember.
Where to Find More
Learn more about the author of The Isle in the Silver Sea at https://tashasuri.com/
Buy The Isle in the Silver Sea at a local bookstore near you or online at our Bookshop
Shanice Felix is a Black, first-generation, Haitian American, queer woman. By day, she puts her B.A. in Film and Media Studies to the test by working as a freelance editor and beta/sensitivity reader, helping creatives tell the stories that make their hearts sing. By night, she fangirls over her favorite books, movies, anime, and fanfics. Don’t get between her and a new chapter update on Ao3. BlueSky @shanicefelix.bsky.social