I found The Serpent and the Wolf to be a difficult read. It’s a fantasy romance and those are usually difficult for me to engage with. You have to really sell me on the developing relationship, and make me love the characters to the point where I am invested in the relationship. If I don’t like the characters, and feel invested in their happiness, I will just bounce off the building relationship…and this is what happened with this novel.
Now, the initial premise was an interesting one. It’s an Enemies to Lovers combined with Arranged and Fake Marriage tropes, which as a concept seemed like fun. Our Tempestuous Heroine is also cursed with a terrifying magical ability that she inherited from her mother. There were also some interesting hints that her father might have intended her to be some kind of spy/intelligence analysist or perhaps assassin, until this career was ended by her suddenly having magic and her brother apparently wanting to kill her because of this. (While using her as an excuse for a war.) There were some definitely interesting ideas here. I would have been on board with Spy Princess. I would have been on board for Fantasy Politics. I did not quite get that.
So, here are some things I bounced off of.
- Our Tempestuous Heroine goes straight from zero to murder, without checking out the lay of the land, or see if she actually needs to murder anyone. Yes, she apparently accepts at face value every terrible rumor she’s heard about a country her father was unable to get spies into, and she expects her husband to be inherently terrible. (This is a reasonable worry, her brother and her father both seem to be/have been terrible people and she doesn’t seem to have had any positive male role models. She apparently expects abuse so she’s going to be hyper-proactive.)
- Writer fails to sell me on Evil Fantasy Russian Empire. (I am referring to it thus because Heroine’s name is Vaasalisa, and many of the character names seem to be Eastern European.) Yes, monarchies are bad, and empires even more bad, but writer reduces it to “monarchy bad, democracy good,” which isn’t very nuanced. (Granted, this is a romance and you don’t really go to romance for nuance, I don’t think?)
- Writer fails to sell me on Secret Agent Vaasalisa. This is mostly because the writer can’t seems to decide if Vaasalisa was trained as a analyst, who was never supposed to go into the field, a spy, or a fantasy politics assassin/wetwork agent. Then later, Vaasalisa states and seems to believe that she was only intended to be destined for a political arranged marriage, despite the extra training she recieved and her actual talents. (I was confused because I thought the writer was implying one thing, but was actually implying another.)
- I am still strongly influenced by my reading of Paladin’s Faith, but I am slightly annoyed that Vaasalisa makes some comment about having “only” been married off for trade agreements involving salt. (A big part of the plot of PF involved the salt trade and how extremely valuable salt is, not just for food preservation but also for various trades and industries that use salt in various chemical compounds and processes.)
- I’m annoyed we didn’t get to see more of the magic school that Vaasalisa sneaks into, but I’m also annoyed that we don’t know how she became familiar with the countries paperwork and bureaucracy, if this country is an intelligence black hole which no one in her empire has any knowledge of. (Note: it is not. The one with the intelligence black hole is Vaasalisa.)
- The entire attempt at the “succession crisis plot” resulting from Vaasalisa getting married…in a marriage arranged by her brother…despite the part where if Vaasalisa gets married, her husband becomes part of the succession. (And thus, her brother is going to murder her and her husband.)
- I wasn’t really able to get invested in the relationship. I do like arranged/political marriages but I found myself frustrated with the characters and the worldbuilding.
- The romantic lead’s nickname for the heroine.
The general feeling I got from this book was that the writer was trying very hard to make Vaasalisa a likable, relatable character at the expense of making her an interesting one. The writer seemed to be going for “Innocent raised by villains, forced to villainy but secretly Good.” This…did not really work for me. If the writer had gone a little harder, and created an actual Spy Princess with a more ruthless and pragmatic personality, I would have been more invested in Vaasalisa’s emotional journey and character development. With all that said, take my misgivings with a grain of salt. There were some very interesting ideas here, and the concept definitely had potential–it just didn’t go where I thought it might. I admit to being picky about books in regard to plot and characterization, so your mileage may vary. This is a book that’s going to be mostly for people who like the tropes on display, and the eventual sexy times.
This review is based on an unproofed galley received from NetGalley.
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