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- Book: The Jasad Crown
- Author: Sara Hashem
- Publisher: Orbit
- Publication Date: July 15, 2025
- Pages: 692
- Genre: High Fantasy/Romantasy/Fantasy
- Spice Rating: 1 out of 5 🌶️ (Light Spice 🌶️ Closed Door, Kissing)
- My Rating: 5 out of 5 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐(Sylvia deserves six stars, honestly.)
Let’s just start with this: The Jasad Crown is everything I wanted — messy emotions, impossible choices, sizzling tension, and magic that feels just a little too real. If you love your fantasy with a side of heartbreak and political backstabbing (and who among us doesn’t?), Sara Hashem absolutely delivers with the conclusion to The Scorched Throne duology.
The Story
Sylvia — our stubborn, brilliant, emotionally-damaged queen without a crown — is once again running from more than just the soldiers hunting her. She’s also running from herself, her past, her people’s expectations, and the terrifying realization that her magic might not just save Jasad…it might destroy her in the process. No big deal, right?
Meanwhile, Arin (yes, that Arin — you know, the Nizahli heir to the empire that led the army that burned her homeland to ash, killed its people, and outlawed magic, leaving Sylvia and the Jasadi people to live in hiding, and oh, is kind of Sylvia’s worst enemy?) is wrestling with some ugly truths about loyalty, power, and the price of following orders. Spoiler alert: it cost more than he can afford.
And can I just say, it’s so refreshing that we finally get multiple POVs in this book? Being inside Arin’s head, along with Sefa’s and Marek’s, adds such rich layers to the story. We get to see their individual journeys — the struggles, the loyalty tests, the love, the devastating losses — and it deepens the whole experience. It’s not just Sylvia carrying the emotional weight anymore. Every character is fighting their own personal war, and it hurts in the best way.
When fate (and some very questionable decisions) push Sylvia and Arin back into each other’s paths, they’re forced to confront everything they thought they knew — about themselves, about each other, and about the war that’s been brewing beneath the surface for years. Duty, survival, loyalty, love — The Jasad Crown throws it all in a blender and hits “liquefy.”
The Characters
Sylvia absolutely owns this book. Her arc is gut-wrenching and beautiful — she’s battling the weight of being Jasad’s heir while barely keeping herself from cracking under the pressure of her own magic. Every decision she makes feels heavy, and Hashem doesn’t pull a single punch about what leadership really costs.
Arin is no slouch either. His journey from soldier to sovereign soul-searcher is brutal, and you feel every scar he earns along the way. I love a morally conflicted boy with a sword, and Arin brings it in spades. Watching these two navigate loyalty, trust, and betrayal made me want to alternately hug them and shake them.
And let’s not forget Sefa and Marek — their stories are heartbreaking and fierce, showing different angles of loyalty and survival in a world that’s literally crumbling around them.
(And if you’re wondering — yes, the chemistry between Sylvia and Arin is absolutely delicious. It simmers. It burns. It wrecks you.)
The World
If you thought the world-building in The Jasad Heir was strong, The Jasad Crown cranks it up to eleven. Hashem’s world feels lived-in and dangerous, rooted in Egyptian-inspired magic, tradition, and politics. The Urabi rebel camps, the crumbling remains of Jasad, the ever-looming threat of the Nizahl empire — every setting feels like it’s teetering on the edge of war…and hope.
And let’s talk about the ancient, otherworldly creatures Hashem brings to life — the Sareekh, the Kitmer, the Khawfa. They are eerie, beautiful, terrifying, and completely original. These beings add this ancient-magic, bigger-than-mortals feel to the story that reminds you the world of Jasad is way older and wilder than any human war.
It’s not just places and monsters, though. Hashem does an incredible job showing how history, propaganda, and memory can twist a people, and how reclaiming a broken legacy is never as simple as putting a crown on your head and waving.
Themes and Feels
This book hits you hard in the “what would you sacrifice for your people?” department. Sylvia’s internal war — between wanting freedom and being shackled to destiny — is raw and real. She doesn’t get easy answers. Neither does Arin.
The Jasad Crown asks the big questions:
- When loyalty costs everything, is it still worth it?
- Can you choose your own path when everyone around you needs you to be something else?
- And maybe the hardest one — how do you forgive yourself when you can’t fix everything?
It’s about power, and how power demands payment — sometimes with your life, and sometimes with your soul.
And that ending? Heartbreakingly beautiful. It’s the kind of finale that leaves you sitting in stunned silence, hugging the book to your chest, because even though it wrecked you, it felt right.
Final Thoughts
If you love fantasy that’s more than just magic and monsters — if you crave stories about broken people trying to be whole in a broken world — The Jasad Crown is for you. It’s fierce, painful, stunning, and honestly? I’m still thinking about it days later.
Sara Hashem, you’ve officially broken my heart — and I am so grateful.
Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing the advance review copy.
🫶🏻 – Ali
