BookTok resurfaces The Midnight Lie, Jasmine Throne

Fantasy backlist is having one of those internet afterlives again. A fresh round of posts on X is pushing Marie Rutkoski’s *The Midnight Lie* and Tasha Suri’s *The Jasmine Throne* back into the recommendation stream, with readers zeroing in on lesbian leads, dense worldbuilding, and the kind of emotional intensity that travels well on BookTok. The interesting part isn’t just that people like these books. It’s that both are older titles, and they’re moving again because readers keep rebuilding mini-canons in public. ### Why these two books? Because they hit a very specific craving. *The Midnight Lie* is Marie Rutkoski’s 2020 YA fantasy about Nirrim, a girl trapped in a rigid class system who gets pulled toward a dangerous stranger and a bigger truth about her world. It’s explicitly framed as an LGBTQ romantic fantasy and sits in the orbit of Rutkoski’s already established fanbase from the *Winner’s Trilogy*. (goodreads.com) *Tasha Suri’s *The Jasmine Throne* does something adjacent but bigger in scale. It opens the *Burning Kingdoms* trilogy with a captive princess, a maidservant with forbidden magic, and a political fantasy world shaped by Indian history and epic traditions. It’s also the kind of book people pitch in one sentence — sapphic, lush, angry, imperial, messy. That pitch travels. (tashasuri.com) ### Why are older books surfacing now? Because BookTok and X don’t work like bookstore tables. They don’t care what came out this week. They care whether a book fits a mood, a trope stack, or a hyper-specific ask like “lesbian fantasy with actual worldbuilding” or “romantic fantasy that feels dangerous instead of cute.” Once a few readers start naming the same titles, the loop cl(tashasuri.com)received the first time but never got locked into permanent mainstream shelf visibility. *The Midnight Lie* has a solid Goodreads footprint — about 14,000 ratings. *The Jasmine Throne* is much larger there, with roughly 37,900 ratings, plus the extra prestige bump of winning the 2022 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. Those numbers matter because they signal that these aren’t obscure pulls — they’re proven books waiting for the next wave. (goodreads.com) ### What makes BookTok good at this? It compresses taste into a usable shortcut. Not a full review — more like a passport stamp. “Sapphic fantasy.” “Political intrigue.” “Forbidden magic.” “Will ruin your life.” That kind of tagging turns discovery into sorting, and sorting is basically the engine of online reading culture now. The catch is that BookTok also (goodreads.com)asmine Throne* is broader, thornier, and much more epic-fantasy coded. But on social platforms, both can live under the same recommendation umbrella because they satisfy the same emotional search query. (goodreads.com) ### Why does that matter for fantasy readers? Because it changes how books stay alive. The old model was release, reviews, maybe awards, then fade. The new model is release, partial fade, then random resurrection when a cluster of readers decides a book fits the current vibe. Basically, fandom has become a rolling used-book display run by algorithms and mutual(goodreads.com)for a publisher campaign to tell them what exists. They can build their own lineage in public — one post, one stack, one “if you liked this, read this” chain at a time. ### So what’s the real story? Not that two books got mentioned online. It’s that BookTok-style discovery keeps turning backlist fantasy into live inventory. *The Midnight Lie* and *The Jasmine Throne* are resurfacing because readers still want sapphic fantasy with substance — and the platforms are very good at making that want visible.