Warning!: This review will contain spoilers. I mean no disrespect to the author or anyone who enjoyed this book. Also I apologise for the spelling, the poor quality writing and overall unprofessional nature of this review – It’s currently 02:56 in the morning and this is a very poor laptop!
Rating: * * * ( 3 stars )
I knew nothing about this book or the author when I bought this book off the Amazon Kindle store yesterday morning and so every bit of this book was a mystery to me.
I was relived to find that Serpent & Dove was better than From Blood And Ash — ( the quote “I put the fun in dysfunctional” still haunts me to this day) — and found it more entertaining than To Kill A Kingdom. However, this book has a few faults.
For one, there are characters who are straight up copys of Shadow And Bone. Now I’ve only watched the show on Netflix but even I can clearly spot blatant attempts at poorly mimicking the characters and their dynamics from the Grishaverse. Prince Beau is so similar to Prince Nikolai it’s laughable. Beau shows up in the halfway point a flirty prince, who has respect for the grisha, – I mean the witches – and is disillusioned by his father the King and simply joins in the fun. There are others but it’s late and I’m too tired to type them all.
I was annoyed by the reveals that every single character is the chosen one/related to a vital villian or side-character. It made any revelation or plot twist feel cheap,
I love shipping ships. I often struggle with romance in books because I find too many of them cringe and sadly whislt this book did start off well – the final act was filled with cringe. Like so many other books, the romance is rushed and becomes cringey. The two main characters are a fully-fledged couple by the end of it and are nauseatingly cringe.
Lou has a couple self-reflective monologues that annoyed me. She wonders if she’s any better than the other witches or the church. Now self reflection is not a bad thing for a character to have but it always felt out of place and frustrating. It was like — ” I’ve put a carton of milk in the fridge. This means I’m a hypocrite and so similar to all the bad people…” — It was annoying.
Also Ansel shifting from believing that all witches should die and be burned at the stake to being totally fine – with not only the idea of witches, but by betraying his organisation in covering them up – in a single page was, embarassing.
The whole group of charaters interacting, all bound by the same mission/goal at the end lacked any meaning due to the fact that two of them were totally random and one had such inconsistent characterisation and the ending felt rushed as well as having an overall cringe feel.
In my opinion what would have made this book better would have been to end the book with Reid and Lou still in the tower, with Reid still unaware of Lou’s witchiness.
I have made this review sound like this was the worst book ever – it’s not. In fact up until the final act ( I’d had some problems with it ) but I’d found it quite enjoyable. It’s only in that last quarter that I felt the story had lost it’s way and had become dull and cringe.
To conclude this book was enjoyable in parts and in others anger-inducing because it simply reminded me of much better books and shows that I’d much rather have been watching/reading.
The Medusa Diaries 