Serpent & Dove Review

Ebook, 513 Pages
YA/ Fantasy/ Romance
By: Shelby Mahurin
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟

“Wicked are the ways of women—and especially a witch. Their guile knows no bounds.”

🌟 I have been very picky lately with YA series and I am just trying to finish the series I already started and not starting anything new! I am doing this to focus on adult fantasy series which I have been into lately. I can’t deny that I am a very curious person and when one book receives as much hype as this one did and when I see all of my friends talking about it and then I start seeing fanart, I knew I had to read it and when 3 of my Best friends on GR rated it high, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

🌟 I did not know what to expect going into this one. The cover is the generic snake of the year and I was not initially invested in it but I actually like it now. The hype can be explained by the fact that it is hater to lovers which is basically everyone’s favorite and the MC here were being compared to Nina and Matthias!

🌟 The prose was good, not lyrical and not dense. I consider this more of a romance story in a fantasy world (Like the main genre I would label it as is romance). If I am going to focus on the fantasy part then it definitely had weaknesses that I will explain later. But as a cute slow burn romance book, this was what I needed in my life! But don’t let this trick you, the book actually has an opinion or two on important topics such as feminism and racism!

“Love makes fools of us all, darling.”

🌟 The book focused on 2 things in my opinion and these are the characters and the plot. The characters specially Lou and Reid were so well written and unique! They were not flawless, they were not annoying, and they were cool! I love both of them although I think I am more of team Reid because his character is not something you typically see in YA books -also he looks good in Fan art- and the rest of the characters were not bad at all. I think the growth of the characters is something I appreciated too in this book but I have to agree with my friend Fares that towards the end, the growth was kind of too fast and was a bit hard to believe. For the most part though I was satisfied and won’t complain.

🌟 The second strong part is the plot which starts slow and gets better with each part, there are 3 parts to the book and the ending of each part has a major event taking place or a good plot twist (I could see some of these and some of them I did not!!). The witches story is something I have not read a lot about although it my seem that it is something abundant in YA but I don’t think so.

🌟 The world building is kind of weak, we never get to discover the magical system properly and the fantasy elements were not the best. The author kept telling us that your sister, neighbor, teacher could be a witch but I would have liked to see how witches live their lives and how the world is affected by their magic rather than being told about it. The magic felt kind of random with no good set of rules to govern it which also annoyed me and left me wanting more. I kind of enjoyed the Parisian settings though and the French vibes the book gave me certainly were good (Ou bien dans ce cas).

“I was no one’s sacrifice. Not then. Not now. Not ever.”

🌟 Summary: Serpent and Dove was a good debut that did the majority of things right but had some weaker aspects. I liked the writing, characters and twists but had a problem with the world building and magical system. The book has a great romance story with the haters to lovers trope done well. I was not disappointed by my friend’s recommendation and will continue to book 2!