In the interests of the perfect not being the enemy of the good, here are some very brief thoughts on Tasha Suri’s Books of Ambha Duology, Empire of Sand and Realm of Ash.
I’d vaguely heard of the first of these when it came out, but it was Becca’s recent blog post that made me do grabby-hands: "Highly fraught arranged marriage, terrible magical coercion, and complex rules-lawyering around binding mystical vows ensue!" Because, I mean, come on.
Anyway. These are Indian-inspired secondary-world fantasy about being raised in an empire that’s destroying your culture and ethnic group—one of them, that is, because the protagonists are of mixed ethnicity (and one of them can pass). The books are appropriately dark (do note the "terrible magical coercion" above, which I admit I kind of skimmed over in my enthusiasm about the items bracketing it), but they’re not at all grimdark. I recommend them mostly because they feature a lot of thoughtful complexity about the ways that the society is structured and how people act and react as a result; and secondarily because the central romantic relationships are a particular catnip of mine, "we are being forced together but are going to do our best to resist by being kind."
(They have led to me to think a lot about the use of ethnicity in fantasy, though. There’s such power in literalizing the metaphor into actual magic blood that is forcibly extracted to maintain empire, as these books do; but I nevertheless am reflexively uncomfortable about having that ethnicity be strictly genetically-defined, as these books also do. More is outside the scope of this blog post, and probably a con panel of its own; but it’s a thing that seemed worth mentioning.)
Finally, I vaguely gather that these were somehow associated with YA in the public mind? I don’t know how or why (they’re published by Orbit), and also I don’t object to YA in general, but if being in the YA genre would be a deterrent: they’re not.