ARC Review: The Silvered Serpents by Roshani Chokshi

Guys it’s finally here and I am so glad to be able to share it finally!!  Thank you so much to Wednesday Books for the eARC in exchange for an honest review!

Quick Facts:

• Title: The Silvered Serpents
• Series: The Guilded Wolves #2
• Author: Roshani Chokshi
• Puisher & Release: Wednesday Books, September 22, 2020
• Rate & Recommend: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 oh yes for fans of YA fantasy, magic, and heists

Here is the synopsis:

Returning to the dark and glamorous 19th century world of her New York Times instant bestseller, The Gilded Wolves, Roshani Chokshi dazzles us with another riveting tale as full of mystery and danger as ever in The Silvered Serpents.

Séverin and his team members might have successfully thwarted the Fallen House, but victory came at a terrible cost — one that still haunts all of them. Desperate to make amends, Séverin pursues a dangerous lead to find a long lost artifact rumored to grant its possessor the power of God.

Their hunt lures them far from Paris, and into the icy heart of Russia where crystalline ice animals stalk forgotten mansions, broken goddesses carry deadly secrets, and a string of unsolved murders makes the crew question whether an ancient myth is a myth after all.

As hidden secrets come to the light and the ghosts of the past catch up to them, the crew will discover new dimensions of themselves. But what they find out may lead them down paths they never imagined.

The most important thing to know is that The Silvered Serpents is 100% inarguably better than the Gilded Wolves. I honestly didn’t love that book as it was overdone with prose and long scientific ramblings. Chokshi speeds it up in this followup – Holly Black apparently offered advice on spicing things up a bit and it definitely worked.

There is still some chattering about puzzles and math, but the book becomes generally a lot more readable. There is still a lot of “purple prose” but descriptions are entirely more concise and the action flows so much better.  I admire Chokshi for keeping the advice and criticism from book one in mind and making this a better sequel.

The Silvered Serpents has plenty of it’s own merits, including the elevation of Laila to my list of top 5 favorite YA heroines ever. She pulled an Inej and loudly, proudly declared that she was not responsible for the soul, fixing, or happiness of some ruined asshole. I mentally dropped the book and started clapping because Laila is amazing. She is the group’s caretaker, the cement, the big sister that they all need.

Chokshi gives her young readers credit, something that a lot of YA authors aren’t doing. Authors: please spare teens and other readers the endless repetition and pining and terrible inner monologue rambling that I have seen in a lot of recent novels. The YA genre deserves the reading comprehension level that this book offers. The only thing that slowed the book down for me was how in some chapters it seemed like she had the thesaurus open and was going for the most obscure words possible. To some extent vocabulary in young adult novels is very important, but there is a point where it slows the story down and just gets unnecessary. She clumps them together too and it threw me off just a bit.

These characters have fixed themselves in history firmly as my favorite heist crew. Enrique and Zofia essentially carried the book for me character wise, along with Hypnos’ antics and Laila’s amazingness. I am shipping these people SO hard

The plot itself is more interesting as well, the crew is tracking down the Sleeping Palace and The Divine Lyrics, which can make gods or break the world depending on how the artifact is wielded. The architecture, traps, obstacles, and magic in this book had me HOOKED. So did some of the historical references, such as the pogroms. Chokshi is bringing in history and lore that actually make sense to the time period and that is awesome.

One other point that I admire is that this book is a meditation on love, masking as grief. Masking as horror. Concern. Banter. Cake and poison. I fully enjoyed reading her discourses on both grief and love in their various forms of expression and think they are both important themes for young adults. I would hand these books to any kid, totally just RIGHT for the target audience.

My best advice is that even if you struggle reading The Gilded Wolves, read this. It gets better. 100% 5 stars all day long