Phuong ✯'s Reviews > The Serpent and the Wings of Night

☆⋅⋆ ─── 1st read 2022: 4.25 stars
☆⋅⋆ ──── 2nd read 2023: 4 stars

Denial is a river in Egypt. I refuse to believe the last 15% of this book happened. Justice for my vampire king.




Sarah J. Maas, Jennifer L. Armentrout, Caroline Peckham & Susanne Valenti, Raven Kennedy and Kerri Maniscalco are shaking right now.. Carissa Broadbent is coming in hot as the newest queen of romantasy books. 👑

Death isn’t frightening when weighed against an insignificant existence.

SONG:
Distraction – Kehlani


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⌁ PLOT
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Oraya (h) is a human girl who got adopted by Vincent, the Vampire King of House of Night, when she was eight years old. For full context there is also the House of Blood and House of Shadows, but they are irrelevant for now. Every 100 years the Kejari takes place, a tournament, where people all over Obitraes can participate. The contestants have to go trough five trials over the period of four months to win. The winner will get granted one wish by Godess Nyaxia the mother of all vampires. The House of Night is kinda divided into two rival vampire clans: the Hiaj and the Rishan vampires. Basically the whole story of The Serpent and the Wings of Night is that Oraya goes through the trials and has to ally with Raihn (H) to survive the tournament.

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⌁ REASONS WHY THIS BOOK IS AMAZING
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☪ What is hotter than a vampire? A vampire with wings.



The world that Carissa Broadbent created with this book is amazing. Vampires always get romanticise in books and I love in this book shows a different side. Vampires are savages, brutal, bloodthirsty and really don’t give a flying fuck. Humans are pretty much livestock here and it’s amazing. Savage vampires meet The Hunger Games.

☪ The plot and magic.

Trials and tournaments are probably my favorite plots. Authors can really get creative with coming up with all kind of games and trials and part of the fun is theorizing what could happen next. And the fact that each of the trial in this book was connected to Nyaxia’s story was so interesting to read. There were so many gods and goddesses mentioned in this book that it will open so many doors for future books in this world and I can’t wait to learn more. The author said that she plans five more books in this series and I have some theories for what the next book might be about, but for the rest I really have no idea where she wants to take this story and I can’t wait to learn about it. Watch me being 55 yo and still read this series. 🥰

☪ Oraya and Vincent’s relationship.

The king did not know then that his greatest love would also be his ruination—nor that either would come in the form of a tiny, helpless human child.

the moment the book started with this quote, I knew their relationship had me by the throat. I have to be honest here and say that Oraya and Vincent’s relationship was the MVP for me and that’s not a shade at Oraya and Raihn’s romance. I’ll come back to that later, but my depraved brain was lowkey shipping Oraya with her father.. yes you’ve read that right they are not blood related so where is the problem 🤡 there is just something about a ruthless, powerful vampire king that takes in a human stray from the street that is so good 🤌 it was giving Kaname x Yuki (Vampire Knight) and Thanos x Gamorra (Marvel) vibes

“You do not have to do this, my little serpent,” he said softly. “I realize only now that perhaps I never told you that.”

HE CALLS HER HIS LITTLE SERPENT DLSFJSDLFJS how can you expect me not to fall for this?! 😩 Vincent was such an interesting character to me .. his duality was so hot. On one hand he is this savage king who rules with an iron fist and has no problem burning a city with 500k men, women, children, human or vampires to the ground. On the other hand he is a nurturing father where his one and only weakness is his little serpent.

Vincent, my father, loved me above all. But Vincent, the Nightborn King, was too ruthless to allow the slightest challenge, love or no.

The complexity of their relationship spoke to me. Vincent was definitely the kind of father that raised Oraya with tough love. He protected her, he taught her how to fight, he taught her how to be hard, he taught her how to be efficient, he taught her how to be ruthless, but most importantly he taught her how to survive in this cruel world of predators. He took away part of her humanity. But underneath all the hard exterior he is such a softie for his little serpent. Every time Oraya barely survived one of the trials and her seeing Vincent reactions to it.. my heart 😭

For me, Vincent was that person. Even when I had no one else, I had him, and I knew beyond any doubt in this world or the next that he would do literally anything for me.

Part of Oraya’s journey was realizing that even though she loved Vincent, she knows he is not a good man. These conflicting feelings made the story more compelling.

“Do you want to change this world, little serpent? Then climb your cage until you are so high no one can catch you. Break its bars and make them your weapons. Nothing is sharper. I know because I did it.”

Did I mentioned that Vincent won the Kejari 200 years ago and gained enough power to become the Nightshade king? HE IS SO HOOOT I CAN’T 😭 he isn’t even a morally grey characters, he has straight out villain traits and committed so many crimes, but do I give a fuck? Clearly not cause I love him the most 🥺👉👈

“I can’t take credit for everything that you’ve become, Oraya. Even if sometimes I wish I could. But if I’m responsible for just one small piece of that, it will have been the greatest accomplishment of my life.”

I WANT TO DIIIEEEEEE 😭😭😭😭😭 LADFJALSKF 😭😭😭😭😭 idk what to do with this unhealthy obsession of mine with this side character like what the hell is this .. every time Vincent opens his mouth I either want to die or want to fuck him there is no in between 😔

Miss Broadbent I need to have a word with you asap! I’m still having a mental breakdown of the last 20% of this book and how dare you for what you did…

☪ Oraya.

I really liked Oraya as the female main character. Even though her character isn’t very original, since she has many of the typical fantasy protagonist traits such as chosen one, weak human that turns powerful, I still like how she questions her own humanity despite being still human. Oraya had the chance to turn her back on this vampire world and find a safe place among the humans, but I love how she say that she rather stays in this place and make a change than being ignorant and safe.

“Don’t be so quick to throw away your humanity, Oraya,” he said. “You might find you miss it once it’s gone.”

Her quest for power is admirable and I want to see more what her vision is for Obitraes is. It feels like this cruel world can’t sink any lower with all the war that has been raging on for quite some time and I’m curious to see how Oraya will handle all the problems.

☪ Oraya and Raihn romance.

Oraya and Raihn have kind of a reverse grumpy-sunshine situation where Raihn is not really a sunshine, but compare to grumpy paranoid Oraya .. you should say he is. While I do love a good reverse grumpy-sunshine dynamic it took me a while to warm up to their relationship due to my inability to stop shipping Oraya with her father until I had to realize that this will never happen and they worked well together. I think my problem with Raihn’s character is that he was so nice and normal compared to all the other vampires? In a world full of backstabbing, cunning and ruthless killers .. Raihn seemed dare I say boring in comparison. I needed more angst, more drama, more backstabbing between the couple and the second half gave that to me.

“Are you going to kill me, Oraya?”
“Not tonight.”
“You might destroy me anyway.”

Another thing that works in Raihn and Oraya’s favor is star crossed of romance of two rival clans. Their romance is very slowburn, but I’m happy to report that the smut scenes that we got where pretty good. My favorite was the biting scene that was 🔥

“We’ll probably die tomorrow,” I said. “Show me something worth living for.”

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⌁ WHY NOT 5 STARS
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☪ There was quite a lot of tell and no show in this book that bothered me a bit. If you didn’t know already Vincent is my fav character from this book, but it was always told to the reader how powerful he is and how he killed so many people and how he did all these horrible things, but I would have loved to see it actually happening. Maybe then I would have put him less on a pedestrial but ahahahah who are we kidding I would have been even more obsessed 🥴. Even with Raihn and Oraya’s training in between the trials, it was always tell, but I would have loved to see more of them fighting and getting stronger on page.

☪ This is such a dumb thing to be petty about, but I HATE FANTASY NAMES AND PLACES. THEY GIVE ME A HEADACHE. It takes me my last remaining 3 brain cells to even remember half of the names in this book and only because Raihn is actually one of the easiest one. But then there is Nyaxia, Atroxus, some guy’s name that reminds me of Salamander, Sivrinaj, Ministaer, Jesmine, Nessanyn, Cairis etc. It took me 10 minutes to look up all these names, cause I only remembered like the first two letters 💀💀

☪ as I mentioned above, it took me a bit to warm up to Raihn. Not because he is not likable or a bad developed romance or anything, but I was too busy shipping two other characters that I had no business shipping that whenever Raihn and Oraya interacted.. I was like “okay cute she’s warming up to him whatever, give me another father daughter scene!!” but I think that’s a me problem, since I don’t think I saw any other reviews who had any problem with him. Something happens toward the end that as long as I live I will never forgive Raihn for, but at the same time it made his character so much more interesting and complex.

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⌁ CONCLUSION
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Before reading The Serpent and the Wings of Night I was very impressed with the 4.54 rating this book has because it’s so rare that the first book in a series gets rated so high, but after reading it.. I can’t lie, it deserves it. This series will be the next most popular romantasy series in the future and it should be! I wish more people will read this book, because the plot is amazing, it’s very fast paced, it has intriguing characters and slowburn romance.

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CROWNS OF NYAXIA SERIES

#1 The Serpent and the Wings of Night – 4 stars
#2 The Ashes and the Star-Cursed King – 2.75 sstars
#3 tbd – tbr
#4 tbd – tbr
#5 tbd – tbr
#6 tbd – tbr
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