caitlin's Reviews > The Serpent and the Wings of Night

WOAH.

first of all, i would like to say thank you to the haters. not people hating on me, but my fellow pessimistic unpopular opinion holders.
i love you all. you're doing the lord's work and i am proud to find myself agreeing with you in many a situation.
but i loved this.
it's not perfect, but it sure is fun.

the characters
i enjoy the main characters. i mostly like oraya, and i do like raihn and vincent and that sweet vampire girl whose name i've already forgotten (it starts with an m).
something i particularly enjoyed was that there are shades of both good and bad in most characters. specifically vincent. it's not black and white, but complicated and textured.

i also really enjoyed the romance! it felt natural and enjoyable, and the smut scenes were tasteful and sweet.
there were also a few cute, almost found family moments that i just ate up.

oraya never felt really annoying to me, though my only qualm with her would be the same trap that many fall into in writing the strong, stubborn female characters archetype. there's a lot of talk to start about hardening your heart and never letting anyone in, etc. and that's a real thing of course, but that emotional indifference that gets written in to make a point in these characters isn't real because it disappears once she meets someone she fancies or who's nice to her. *cough cough* THE ENDING
and that's fine--but it's not long suffering emotional indifference.

the writing/pacing
there were a few of those gimmicky things that make me want to smack my head into a wall: the emphasized height difference, the smelling (no, the fuck he does not smell like the wind), the eyes (HE HAS RED EYES. THAT AREN'T REALLY RED. JUST HAZEL THAT LOOKS LIKE RED. I GET IT. IT'S NOT THE CURE TO CANCER, WE CAN MOVE ON), but it was all minor and didn't bother me too much.

the pacing was fast, and there were a lot of repetitive, adrenaline-rushing, life threatening situations. i swear this girl almost died over 8 times. no exaggeration.
which, on one hand, gave it a "rushing through page after page, reading with bated breath" feeling, but also got old after the third time. she's going to survive it, i know that, so why am i here? i'm not a sadist, i don't particularly like watching people almost die for fun.

the action scenes happening one after the other after the other also pushed a lot of the world building and that development to the background. hell, a large fact of the plot is precisely the fact that she isn't out in the world, and standing by blindly while massive cultural and political shifts happen.

i want to add:
one of my favorite things in this was the layering of stories. we had the main storyline, but a few other stories were weaved into it. the interludes that caught us up on oraya's childhood? love it. the story of nyaxia and learning that as we go through the trials? obsessed.
this added a lot of interest and, clearly, is something i loved.

originality
is it the most original thing ever? no. it's an amalgamation of all the other famous fantasy romances that have come before it. it's basically the hunger games but with vampires and magic. some of the characters and their backstories and interactions hark back to what i've read in sarah j maas books.
is it the most original thing ever? no. but it's not meant to be. it's meant to be fun. and it was fun.

i think because of this, though, i saw most of it coming. and what i didn't guess, i wasn't surprised by. so i don't quite understand the hype over all the plot twists and turns.

anyways, i enjoyed it! i'd definitely recommend!

another thing--maybe this is my unpopular opinion streak refusing to quit, but i liked this and would recommend this more than fourth wing. i know that's the book of the summer and everything, but this is a finished duet (that you don't have to throw fists to get a copy of) and i prefer how carissa writes characters and character growth.