The Serpent King
Ratings16
Average rating4
15
Ratings16
Average rating4
Dillard Early Jr., Travis Bohannon, and Lydia Blankenship are three friends who have one thing in common: none of them fit the mold in tiny Forrestville, Tennessee. Dill, a talented musician, grew up in a Pentecostal snakehandling church, playing in the praise band. During his freshman year, his father went to prison for a heinous crime, leaving Dill and his mother impoverished.
Travis is a gentle giant who works at his family’s lumberyard and is obsessed with a Game of Thrones–like fantasy series, much to his abusive, alcoholic father’s displeasure.
Lydia comes from a loving upper-middle-class family and runs a popular fashion blog that’s part Tavi Gevinson, part Angela Chase, and part Dolly Parton. She’s actively plotting her escape from rural Tennessee for bigger and better things, to capitalize on her Internet fame. This will mean leaving behind Dill—whose feelings for her run deep.
But that’s not Dill’s only problem. He has a cursed name. His grandfather, Dillard Early, became consumed with slaughtering snakes in grief and vengeance after one killed his daughter. He wore their skins pinned to his clothes during his descent into darkness. The whispering and staring locals called him “the Serpent King” before he committed suicide by poison. Dill’s father, also named Dillard Early, was the pastor of Dill’s church, whose parishioners handled serpents and drank poison as signs of faith.
Caught between his mother’s pulling him to drop out of school to help pay off the family debts and Lydia’s pushing him to go to college to escape Forrestville’s whispers and stares, Dill is quickly approaching a reckoning. One that will force him to confront the legacy of darkness—serpents and poison and self-destruction—that is his inheritance.
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11.4.16 edit: The end of 2016 is rapidly approaching, and will it comes my mental recap of all the books I had the opportunity to read this year. And my mind keeps on coming back to this book. It is, by far, the best book I have read this year. And upon reviewing my review, I have come to the conclusion that no matter how hard I try, I will never be able to comprehend the right string of words to express how important this story is to me. The Serpent King is the first book I have ever read where I see my problems reflected into a character. I've read many contemporary books that deal with important life-altering issues, ranging from mental health to sexuality to physical impairment. This is the first, and only book, I have ever read that deals with a character's struggle with religion. Which, not to get to personal, is the main struggle I have in my life. I can count on one hand the number of times I have actually cried in a book. In fact, I can give you a quantitative number. Twice. This is one of them. This book is by far the most underrated book I know of.
4.5/5 stars“People are born and die. Seasons change. Rivers flow to the sea. Earth circles the sun and the moon circles Earth. Everything whirring and spinning toward something. And I get to be part of it for a little while, the way I get to watch a train for a minute or two, and then it's gone.”
Something about this book had me intrigued. Perhaps it was the title. Perhaps it was because I knew this story was a coming of age novel with a male protagonist, and for some reason I adore those kind of books. It must have been one of those reasons, as I knew almost nothing about the plot. I don't know, but I've seen it a few times here and there and I just had to read it. One day I noticed it on sale on Kindle for $2.99 and I didn't even hesitate to buy it. Finally, I had my chance to read it, to know what it was all about, and I sat down and read it.
The Serpent King is the story of three friends who fail to fit in with their small southern town. There's Dill, a musician who struggles with religion. Travis, a fantasy fanboy who struggles with an abusive father. And Lydia, a fashion blogger who struggles to stay put in their small town. Each character has to find their way in life and forge their own destiny, learn that what they think they have planned in their life might not be what the future holds.
With a personal library full of fantasy and cheesy contemporary books, it's rare for me to connect to much in a book. I read to escape reality, that I usually don't seek out books that remind me of my own life. Yet, this book was almost refreshing. I connected with Dill's battle to understand his religious beliefs. I connected with Travis's love for fantasy books and the way his friends and family didn't understand it. And I connected with Lydia's desire to go far off to college and leave her past behind her.
This book had it's faults, some details felt unrealistic and the ending seem to drag on a little, but I found this story to be beyond beautiful and heartbreaking, and one I'd recommend to anyone.
4.5 Such a strong debut, worthy of the awards! The character arcs were a bit predictable but that didn't stop them from breaking my heart or filling me with joy. I felt for and with Dill, Lydia, and Travis. Great BOB selection, really looking forward to talking about this book with the kids.
The town I grew up in was just this side of rural by the time I hit high school: they put up the first full stoplight (not just a blinking red or yellow) when I was in eighth grade. Our first McDonald's came that year too, or the year after. I sometimes wonder what my life would have been like if we'd had the internet in high school. The internet was around when I was in high school, of course (I graduated in 2003). Everyone had an email address, and (more importantly) an AIM screen name. But the internet was dial-up, and unless you had two phone lines at your house, you couldn't be constantly online or no one would be able to make calls. What I mean was if we'd had the internet like today, constant availability and access. I used books and movies to escape the limits of my experience as a high schooler, but if I were in high school today, I have to imagine I'd have been an active blog reader and probably a blogger myself.
Which is why I think I connected so hard with Lydia, one of the three rural Tennessee high school students at the heart of The Serpent King. Lydia reminds me of myself in high school...that feeling that you were destined for something greater than what Belle in Beauty and the Beast referred to as “this provincial life” (Belle's kind of a snob when I think back to that movie). Thinking that you were smarter than the people around you, and that somehow made you better than them. While I had a little bit of a hard time buying that Lydia wouldn't have at least some social interest from her peers solely by virtue of her fashion-blogger access to fancy things, she was such a well-drawn character and her emotional truth resonated enough to make this merely a quibble.
Her two best friends and fellow outcasts: Dill, the son of a Pentecostal minister serving time for possession of child pornography, and Travis, a hulking, gentle soul who immerses himself in a Song of Fire and Ice-esque fantasy series, are trying to navigate their senior year. Senior year of high school is such an emotionally-charged time of life, where you start really thinking about The Future in a real way for the first time. The K-12 schooling that has been your entire life since you can remember is about to be over, and the future can feel both overwhelmingly wide and incredibly narrow at the same time. Everything is tinged with a kind of premature nostalgia because you know it's ending. The Serpent King captures the feeling of senior year with such assuredness and beauty that it took me straight back there mentally...I found myself pondering what senior-year me would think about the life I've ended up with, what I would have been like as a senior if I graduated ten years later, trying to figure out what ever became of people that I haven't even thought about in ages.
This is the best high-school experience novel I've read since The Perks Of Being A Wallflower. Chbosky's novel has become a modern-day classic, and I don't see any reason why The Serpent King shouldn't do the same. Strong characters and a beautifully-told, powerful story. A must-read.
