The Serpent's Shadow

I loved the premise of this and have to give this some kudos for doing something that most fantasy books in the early 2000s would never - have a POC protagonist who is half-Indian and whose Indian heritage actually plays a major part in the plot. There were some issues in this book that stuck out to me however.

Colonialism. You can't avoid this topic if you're talking about Indian characters living in Edwardian London. I have mixed feelings about the way it was dealt with here. As I've already said above, I appreciate that Lackey was pretty progressive for her time in even having a half-Indian protagonist being aided by Hindu gods. I loved the idea that there was a different type of magic in India which was separate from that of the English. What I didn't like, though, was the fact that the antagonist was also Indian and Hindu. Shivani's whole motivation behind her crusade was to get vengeance against the British for colonising India. No matter how twisted and deranged Shivani might be, she ultimately killed a microscopic fraction of the people the British did when they colonised India (and many other countries), so taking this motivation of vengeance and casting it in a villainous light just somehow didn't sit right with me. Obviously I'm not saying that we should all become murderers to seek vengeance and violence is never the answer, but I'm also not a fan of casting a colonised subject as a villain in that light - it smacks too much of a “people should stay in their (subjugated) place” message to me.

Women's rights. It's also hard to avoid this topic in Edwardian London when your protagonist is a very, very progressive female doctor in a world where the suffragette movement is in full swing. I thought this theme was much more well-done than the one about colonialism and I would've actually preferred if we had perhaps had more emphasis on this one rather than the other. Having an average-sized book deal with two such heavy themes was just too little pages for too much to say, and I felt like the book could've been more focused.

Chemistry was non-existent. Again, too little pages for too much to say. There was so much about the above two themes and establishing the magic system that it kinda squeezed out the romance. I'd typically be fine with that, but I've a feeling the romance was supposed to be a main part of the story so I was a little confused here. We didn't really see Maya and Peter spending a lot of time together apart from Peter giving her lessons on magic, and that's about it. They didn't seem to have much conversation (as far as we saw) with each other outside of that. The bit where their feelings were made known to each other also felt incredibly abrupt and out of nowhere, and so I couldn't quite buy into everything that followed.

Ending felt rushed and almost anticlimactic. The book kinda felt like it was over before I knew it. I was anticipating a much longer confrontation and with more conversation between the antagonist and our main characters, but we didn't really get that. I was also expecting something of an “aftermath” chapter where we have the characters reflect about what happened and maybe also round up a bit of the themes that were explored in the book like the colonialism bit or women's rights - but we also didn't get that.

Overall, it was fairly enjoyable and I might pick up the next book. I really liked the premise of retelling the fairytales but all within the same universe and with the same magic system as a base, but I felt like the themes and storytelling could have been tighter.