Review: The Serpent and the Wings of Night

Non-spoiler part:

The Serpent and the Wings of Night is a new adult fantasy featuring romance, vampires, political intrigue and bloody contests. It has the game elements similar to The Hunger Games, and vampire & romance elements similar to From Blood and Ash.

It follows Oraya, who is human and therefore condemned to fight for her life every day in order to survive in a world where vampires rule. Vincent, both her father and the Nightborn King, has trained her into the perfect human warrior, aware of just how vulnerable is, even within his own court.

But self-defense isn't enough for Oraya. She wants to stop living in fear every minute of every day. So she enters the Kejari - a fight-to-the-death tournament that, if she wins, will have her wish granted by the vampire goddess Nyaxia. It's there that she meets Raihn, who she is involuntarily drawn to. But competing together means that they'll have to kill each other eventually.

The Kejari plot was an easy hook, making me desperate to keep reading. I always give extra credit to a book that manages to occupy my thoughts outside of its pages, so this novel is no different. It's such a rich world, exploring themes like power, love, identity, inequality.

Spoiler-part:

+Vampirism

I love the new perspective to vampirism this novel puts forward. So far, pop culture has already brought us a variety of perspectives towards vampires. Bella Swan, for instance, starts out living life oblivious to and indifferent about vampirism, but after meeting Edward, she wants to become one herself – though I can’t remember what, exactly, her reasons are, except for wanting to be with him forever – and though she is strongly advised against it, life is pretty much glorious as soon as she becomes one. To her, vampirism is worth it for love.

Elena Gilbert never wants to be a vampire because she wants to have a future, options, choices. Children, maybe. When she becomes one despite her wishes, her stance about vampirism stay the same. She hates it and longs to be human again. To her, vampirism means the opposite of choices. (And, giving credit where it's due, that's also echoed in Bella's decision to have Edward's vampire baby before transitioning into a vampire. What an odd plot that was.)

Now Oraya starts out wanting to be a vampire just because she’s sick of fearing for her life all the damn time, sick of feeling like little more than prey, a blood bag. Vampires are terrifying in this world, and there are so many of them. It’s no wonder that Oraya longs to belong even though the odds are so obviously stacked against her. Vampirism, to her, is both her greatest enemy and her salvation. Vampirism is power, protection. I followed her logic when she wanted to use the Kejari wish to become one herself. I wanted her to have what she wanted. Only when Raihn explained to her how valuable human life is did I see the other side of it. Being human is a beautiful thing in his eyes. Life is precious. Maybe the transience and fragility of human life is exactly what makes it so. It’s no glorification of immortality (which was a fundamental disappointment for me in The Invisible Life of Addie Larue), nor a glorification of humanity, either, but a realistic view that deeply respects the unescapable parts of being human.

There’s no wrong or right answer here. Yes, Oraya wants to be just as powerful as the monsters around her so that she doesn’t have to be afraid all the time anymore, so that she can finally start living instead of surviving. But in order to do so, she’d have to become a monster herself. Is that the answer?

The underlying question here is, of course: is power really the answer when it corrupts you?

Oraya’s position in this vampire society makes for interesting interpretations and real-life comparisons. That was one of the most interesting aspects to this novel. In Oraya’s fear, I see reflected the fear of women in a male-dominated world, afraid of male violence, rage and abuse. Oraya is all too aware how inferior, how weak her body is compared to vampires. They heal better, they are stronger, faster, have better senses. In that awareness I see reflected my own fear, realizing my body’s inferiority in strength compared to the average man who wishes me harm. And it’s not just that; women get assaulted every day, and men get away with it because the system, the very structure of society, has been shaped by them. It has gotten better over the centuries, but even then, every woman knows the fear of walking alone at night.

Just like Oraya does.

And just like women yearn for equality, so does Oraya. But the biological differences between us remain. We can’t ignore them, so how do we live with them while still striving for a better society?

All these moral dilemmas and questions made for a novel with surprising depth to it. This is how I would love for more YA/NA novels to be. You can give readers action, suspense, romance, and relevant themes that gives them something to think about.

-+Writing

Where the writing style is concerned, it’s not too embellished, mostly functional, but pleasant. The descriptions, however, could’ve been better in some instances; I remember some architectural details of the being explained well, but if I remember correctly, Oraya's physical description came quite late in the novel. For a long while that I was reading, I had no idea what she looked like. In addition, there were some instances, most notably during the Kejari trial and action scenes, that I couldn’t for the life of me imagine what things looked like. There was an arena, and apparently was somewhere in Sivrinaj, but why did the contestants have to be magicked there? How come so many people showed up to the trials even though the dates were never set? Where did the light come from if they had to fight at night?

There are a lot of things that are never explained or explained too late. What is the conflict between the Hiaj and the Rishan? If the Rishan resist, who leads them? What’s up with the magic system? There’s different types of magic, and apparently it exists because of the gods and goddesses, but does that mean that magic is limitless? Do the gods decide how much you get to use their magic? Is everyone, aside from godly preference, equal in terms of magical power, or are there individual differences in ability? Do the gods have to approve of every single use? And what about the humans, why can't they use magic if they also pray to their gods? Do humans have any say in politics? If Vincent sees humans only as livestock, and vampires eat them in the slums every night, how is it possible humans don’t flee the country en masse? Why don’t they strike alliances and rise up against their oppressors? Some world-building is there, but there are still many questions to be answered. I hope to find them in the sequel.

-Clichés

Despite its interesting take on vampirism, however, it still sometimes stumbles into the pitfalls of clichés that had me rolling my eyes. Within the vampire fantasy genre, which I haven't even read too much from, there are certain clichés that I was a little tired to see in this book. Vampire blood as an aphrodisiac is one such example. I'll tell you my problem with it in more detail than you'd probably like.

In the sense that this is usually used, which is romantically, it feels like a lazy excuse for some graphic content. Now my problem isn't with the grapic content, it's solely with the implications of the vampiric aphrodisiac leading to it. Here's the thing: if the romance had been written well, there would be no need for an aphrodisiac of any kind. I think it's a weak excuse for the characters to be sexual with each other when it happens too early in the development in their relationship. If you really think about it, a well-written romance has no problem conveying to the reader that two characters want each other sexually. If a writer needs to use vampire venom for the characters to be justified in their sexual attraction to each other, then maybe the writer is doing something wrong. When you're very much in love, you don't need vampire venom to want to rip someone else's clothes off. This happens naturally. You even can have sexual attraction without love, but not the other way around. Romantic love rarely comes without (the only exception being asexuality). So why the need for an aphrodisiac?

The thing is, Broadbent seemed vaguely aware of this, writing, “And the most frightening part of all—the part that would have scared me away, if my logical mind had been at all functional in this moment—was that it wasn’t the venom. No, all of this had already been there, simmering. This was only what made it bubble over.”

Yeah, no, it doesn't work like that. You can't write so obviously that it's the vampire venom making someone horny, and then say it was her natural attraction to him all along. It's a way to cover for the uncomfortable feeling that occurs when two people start being physical with each other too soon. The times that I read it featured enemies-to-lovers, and I understand it's a logical problem for this trope. It's difficult, writing two people going from dislike or even hatred to desire and loving in a coherent, non-awkward way.

I'm not so unnuanced as to say there's no scenario that this might still work. If a venom aphrodisiac scene between romantic interests happens very, very early in the development, then the experience might be the catalyst for the romantic interest. And when I say very, very early, I mean that the characters hardly know each other and have had very little interaction with each other. Introduce a vampire-venom induced graphic scene, and the mere shared memory of the heated interaction might cause very real sexual tension in its wake. But even then, the aspect creating tension would be the anticipation of when the characters reach the point of having sex voluntarily and without the aphrodisiac. That scenario has a much better pay off, and can still be romantic.

In addition, I just prefer when vampires are scary. The sexual subtext in vampirism has been present from its very conception, but I just think it's a little uninspired to have vampire venom be, literally, an aphrodisiac. More subtlety leaves more room for literary interpretation. Where does pleasure end and pain start? Do they overlap? Should they overlap? Can danger itself be sexually enticing? Why?

Eliminating the experience of pain and fear from the vampire bite by making vampire venom an aphrodisiac is such a loss, both in the romantic and literary sense.

Final thoughts

This novel wins a lot of points for being so addictive and refreshing with its perspectives on vampirism and humanity. It loses some for its descriptions - which were in some instances great, and a bit lacking in others - and its clichés. Let's just not use vampire venom as an aphrodisiac anymore, okay? In any case, this brings me to my final rating of 4.5☆ out of 5.

Notable quotes:

“That wasn’t how I’d imagined making you come for the first time,” he remarked.

“[…] his hands fell to my waist immediately, like they had already been waiting for me.”

“Love was a sacrifice at the altar of power.”