November 1, 2016
A girl raised as an assassin is sent after a cute boy in Sundari, an Indian-inflected fantasyland.Marinda is a visha kanya, a poison maiden. She was given to her handler, Gopal, as an infant and dosed with ever stronger snakebites until her kiss itself is toxic. She's now 17, and Gopal regularly sends her out to kiss boys--on the orders of the Raja, he tells her--and though Marinda's plagued with guilt, she has no choice. Her 7-year-old brother, Mani, has a painful disease, and Gopal has the only medicine that helps. When Gopal sends her after dreamboat Deven, whose eyes are "pools of melted chocolate," Marinda's torn between her unwillingness to hurt Deven and her need to protect Mani. She soon discovers her entire life is a lie and is left reeling, providing a solid setup for the B-movie climax. Decent plotting and romantic tension are strained by confusing worldbuilding. Indian food and creatures inspired by Hindu mythology provide Sundarian flavor: Marinda eats chapati and samosas; she fears the Raksaka and the Nagaraja. The technology level seems arbitrary; characters wear hiking boots and live in modern row houses with showers, but the Raja's palace is lit by torches, and his soldiers are armed with swords and spears. Avoid this curry-house fantasy and try Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's The Conch Bearer (2003) or Roshani Chokshi's The Star-Touched Queen (2016) instead. (author's note) (Fantasy. 12-16)
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February 1, 2017
Gr 8 Up-Destined to slay the enemies of the Raja, Marinda has never questioned her role as a visha kanya ("poison maiden"). In the kingdom of Sundari, snake venom runs through the veins of the poison maiden, enabling her to fell a man with one fatal kiss. Wrenched from her family as a baby and transformed into a deadly assassin, the teen is convinced that her kill orders are protective measures taken to ensure the safety of a king she's never met. Gopal, her sadistic handler, manipulates Marinda into cooperating by threatening harm to her younger brother, Mani. Most of the boys she's killed are strangers, but when Marinda is asked to dispatch her friend Deven, she grows a conscience. In her bid to save Deven's life without having to compromise her brother's, Marinda desperately races against time to figure out whom she's been blindly serving all these years. With a rich tapestry of characters ranging from Kadru, a poison mistress, to Raja himself, Shields's first installment in a fantasy duology is intriguing if a little slow-paced. The author's easy co-optation of Indian and other cultural mythology, though, raises questions for discussion. The text is liberally peppered with Sanskrit, but there is no glossary for context, only an afterword, in which the author writes that "Sundari is not India, it is influenced by that culture and its mythology." Shields reimagines Garuda, "a birdlike creature," as female and also mixes in Egyptian mythology ("If the heart is as light as a feather, the person can enter the afterlife. If not, the heart is fed to a beast.").
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July 1, 2017
Many people in fictional Sundari think visha kanya (which means "poison maidens" in Sanskrit) are only mythical, but Marinda knows better: she's forced into service as such an assassin to help her sick little brother. But she can't bring herself to assassinate Deven, and together Marinda and Deven expose secrets in their society. A fast-paced fantasy woven together with elements of Indian folklore.
(Copyright 2017 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)