The Silvered Serpents by Roshani Chokshi
⭐⭐⭐ (3.75) Fantasy: A found family of teens search for a divine relic
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐ (3.75)
Genre: Historical Fantasy
Key topics/tropes: Magic, found family, secret society
Grade: Young Adult
Series: The Gilded Wolves #2
Published: Sep 22, 2020
Length: 400 pages
Format Read: Ebook
POV: First, multiple perspectives
Content warnings & important topics (More listed in Spoiler section)
Grief
Violence
Antisemitism
Death
Racism
Links
Summary
In pursuit of a long-lost artifact rumored to hold the power of God, Séverin takes his heist team to Russia, where they face new discoveries about themselves, the fallout of a loss that still haunts them each in different ways, and an ancient deadly myth.
Review
This felt a lot slower than The Gilded Wolves (The Gilded Wolves #1), which initially worried me because I dread ‘middle book’ syndrome. But I actually enjoyed this more than The Gilded Wolves, particularly due to Chokshi’s focus on the character work. We get deeper and more nuanced views into individual characters and their shared dynamics, especially after the tragedy that ended Book #1.
Séverin has closed himself off from the world. In grief and mourning, his mind is a very dark place to read from. He’s single-mindedly obsessed with the mission of finding the artifact, at the expense of being cruel to his friends (More in Spoilers).
Laila has withdrawn from her hobbies and friendships. The secret she’s been holding has become more time-sensitive, and she’s coming to terms with what that means for herself and her family.
Zofia is beginning to understand herself more, in terms of how her mind ‘works’ and differs from others’. As she gains a sense of self-acceptance, she’s also better understanding how she fits into the group and allows herself to feel belonging.
Enrique has busied himself with historian work. Throughout the book, he gains more of a sense of self-worth both as a member of the family and the team, but also as a partner in his relationship with Hypnos (More in Spoilers).
Hypnos is desperately trying to keep the family together, despite always being on the outskirts of it. His loneliness is more apparent and you get the sense that he’s needs the group to be happy again because it was the only place he could see himself belonging.
A big chunk of the book is spent in one location, which leant to the story feeling less action-adventurey than Book #1. But it also leant to more natural opportunities for character development scenes, so I didn’t mind.
The puzzles still have a Dan Brown vibe (again, not a negative point). If you like the solving-puzzles-through-mythological-contexts fun of Dan Brown, you’re set (Tiny exception in Spoilers). If not, this is probably not the series for you lol.
Two new characters (Eva and Ruslan) are introduced and they shake things up in good and bad ways: helping the mission progress and starting drama within the family. I think they were interesting additions on both fronts, but I had a tiny nitpick with Chokshi’s decision to bring them in (More in Spoilers.)
In addition to the overall series’ themes of power and colonization, Silvered Serpents brought in more commentary on gender and the complexity of love. Delphine is the matriarch of House Kore and a previous childhood guardian of Séverin. We see more of her backstory and insights into society’s current views on women:
Power liked irony, she thought. She had been denied a woman’s power to give birth, but granted the power her birth as a woman should have denied. Her family still bristled at how she had become matriarch of House Kore. But they didn’t have to like it. They just had to obey it.
In Laila’s situation, the commentary on gender has hints of a meta-commentary on the role of female characters in fiction, and how their storylines may be used for the character development of their male counterparts (More in Spoilers.)
I really appreciated Chokshi’s explorations on the different manifestations of love: familial love, unrequited love, parental love, and in Séverin’s case, love that becomes perverted by the sheer level of fear that fuels it:
What he had done had not looked like love. But then again, love did not always wear a face of beauty.
Overall, I enjoyed my time with The Silvered Serpents because I felt so deeply for and with the characters. I couldn’t give the book a full four stars because I felt the non-character elements of the writing weren’t too strong. But still a good time and I look forward to reading anything Roshani Chokshi writes.
Author Rep Notes
Roshani Chokshi is Indian and Filipino.
Character Rep Notes
Race
Séverin — Algerian and French
Laila — Indian
Enrique — Filipino and Spanish
Hypnos — French and Haitian
Sexuality
Hypnos and Enrique are openly queer, expressing interest in both men and women, but no labels are specified.
Neurodivergence
Zofia is coded as being autistic, experiencing trouble understanding unspoken nuances in social interactions.
Disability
Eva walks with a cane due to a past injury.
Notable quotes
“The difference between a diamond necklace and a diamond dog collar depends on the bitch. And they both have teeth, Monsieur.”
“All goddesses are just beliefs draped on the scaffolding of ideas. I can’t touch what’s not real…But I can worship it all the same.”
“I’m fairly certain you’ll be the death of me…and yet I can’t bring myself to mind.”
Also by Roshani Chokshi:
The Gilded Wolves (The Gilded Wolves #1)
🚫 Spoilers ahead
Additional content warnings:
Infertility
Miscarriage
Child abuse
Séverin’s character
He lost a lot of my sympathy with his cruelty: Playing with Laila’s emotions, sabotaging Enrique’s attempts to join his Filipino peers, and who knows what’s actually happened to Zofia’s sister. It’s a huge frustration of mine in any media where a character is single-minded on a mission to do something good for their loved ones (if you can call making them gods without their permission or knowledge ‘good’), but it’s done at the expense of their autonomy and personal lives.
BUT I get that he was motivated by fear and grief, and I think it was a daring decision on Chokshi’s part to take him from Loveable Dad of the group (in Gilded Wolves) to Cruel Tyrant in this book. And I like that she dared, especially in a YA book. We’re not supposed to like Séverin here, even if we liked him before. People are allowed to become bad and we’re allowed to lose love for these people.
Enrique & Hypnos’s relationship
I really appreciate how their relationship concluded. Enrique decides he won’t settle for a situationship or someone whose type of love doesn’t align with his own.
“You and I…we understand each other’s pasts.” But a shared past didn’t make a future.
Hypnos connects with Enrique on a deep level because they can relate to each other, which is its own type of love. But it’s not what Enrique wanted out of this relationship; he wanted love that stood on its own, between two people who didn’t have to dig deep to find that feeling:
“I think, with enough time, I could learn to love you,” said Hypnos.
“Perhaps we both deserve someone who is not so hard to love,” said Enrique.
Though I thought they were adorable together, I did sense from Book #1 that their relationship wouldn’t last because Enrique was always looking for something deeper, and Hypnos didn’t seem to be in a mental/emotional place where he’d settle down into a committed partnership.
Dan Brown-esque puzzles
Super picky and unimportant nitpick — The characters spend a long time trying to decode a series of symbols that I immediately recognized as a pigpen cipher because I had seen it used in a Dan Brown book.
I was able to decode it in a minute or two, so it was mildly frustrating to see the group make such slow progress on it. But that’s just a unfortunate coincidence, so it doesn’t have any bearing on my rating.
New characters
It doesn’t turn out to be much of a ‘reveal’ that they’re traitors when you look at the book as a whole. They’re named characters who show up without invitation to ‘help’ with the mission, so they’re immediately suspect.
If they had been brought in through social connections of one of the main characters, the reveal might have been more surprising. But they literally just ~show up~ and so I always had a lingering suspicion we weren’t getting their full story.
Laila & Meta-Commentary
Laila basically expects to die very soon, due to a childhood prophecy that projected she’d only live until her 19th birthday. Obviously, she’s been thinking a lot about the meaning of death and how/if she would tell her loved ones. She considers if telling Séverin would help him through his mental struggle, but decides not to:
“My life, and whatever is left of it, will not be what his soul gnaws on to regain its strength. My death is not in service to his character, and I will not be a sacrifice simply for him to find peace of mind. He is not my responsibility to save.”
I loved Laila so much in this moment. I detest stories where a woman’s tragic experience spurs the character growth of a man and he’s meant to seem so honorable because he’s now motivated to save or avenge a woman. Let the male characters create their own character growth moments and let the women keep their own experiences. As Laila puts it: “I have had things taken from me my whole life. My death with not be one of them.”