Girl, Serpent, Thorn follows Soraya, a princess that is confined in a castle, who is poisonous to the touch. She is cursed so that anyone that touches her bare skin drops dead almost instantly, leaving her to be hidden away in isolation. When the monster from legend attacks her city, she is the only one that can save it but she is woefully unqualified. She receives help from an unlikely ally and goes on a journal of self-discovery and acceptance.

There isn’t much I can say plot-wise because anything I said would spoil the whole book so I’ll talk about the book instead. I read a lot of books and a lot of them are pretty similar. They hit all the same beats so I can usually guess what’s going to happen next in the story. This book surprised me. At every turn had no clue what would come next and I’ve been trying to figure out why that was and I think I figured it out. The main character fails. A lot. And it isn’t just some small mistakes that she then fixes in a few pages and was only included to push forward her character arc. These mistakes change the course of the story many times. Her decisions and actions are so obviously dictated by how she was brought up and her life circumstances that maybe I should have seen them coming a lot of the time, but I didn’t. This might just be me, but it definitely made reading this book much more enjoyable than many of the books I’ve read lately.

This book is good in an unassuming way. It doesn’t smack you in the face demanding to be seen but instead lays at your feet hoping you’ll take a moment to appreciate it. Which kind of fits with the main character now that I think about it. You can’t see the power it holds until you dare to touch it.

As one of the only negatives I had from this book, I had hoped for more romance. I was told this was an LGBT book, but there wasn’t all that much romance in the book so even though it was LGBT we don’t get much LGBT romance. But I can look past this because the story focused more Soraya finding confidence and comfort in herself, not someone else. And I gotta say, it was pretty refreshing reading a story that didn’t put much stock into the romance aspect. I’m just a sucker for romance.

I want to point out that this isn’t a perfect book, there are some errors here and there and I could nitpick the heck out of it, but it’s REALLY good. I can tell that Bashardoust really loves this story and held onto it for a while before writing it. I can’t say this about most books, but I read it slowly. I didn’t feel the need or want to devour this in one sitting. So even though it’s a smallish book, it took me a bit to read. I just wanted to understand every part of this book and I think I did.

As soon as I finished reading it I wanted to reread it (which is super rare for me) so there is really no other ranking I can give this book other than 5 stars. I loved it and can’t wait to read it again in the future. I highly recommend this book to anyone.

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bookbarn's reviews 74 reviews

bookbarn's reviews
74 reviews