The Serpent King

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.

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.