The Serpent’s Shadow

This is my favorite of Mercedes Lackey\’s re-told fairy tales, and I was pleased to find it available in audio format. Maya Witherspoon is a terrific character and you immediately become engrossed in her story as a young Anglo-Indian woman who has successfully conquered the barriers of the male-dominated English medical/surgical profession in the late 1800s. The people she meets in her London charity hospital work and her private medical practice are vividly portrayed, and many become her friends and supporters. Michelle Ford does a quite good job of differentiating the characters\’ voices and accents, both male and female. Highly recommended, and I know I\’ll listen to this again and again.

I enjoyed this story very much, my first from Mercedes Lackey. It was such an interesting mixture of England, India, Turn of the Century, Women\’s Suffragettes, and magic, with a splash of romance thrown in, for good measure. Michelle Ford did a good job of narration, though she mis-pronounced several words. Difference between English and American pronounciations? Not sure.

I think Mercedes Lackey writes very well, but apparently I just can\’t read her stuff. I started some other series of hers a number of years ago and couldn\’t finish it because there was so much terrible stuff done by the bad guys. I decided to try her again with this book, and I\’m having the same problem. I think she has done an admirable job of painting an accurate picture of life in London in the early 1900s. Unfortunately, if you were a woman or a poor person, that was a pretty horrible place. For every pleasant or happy scrap of story, there are 19 pieces about the atrocities committed upon the poor by the rich or just the horrors of life before antibiotics and decent hospitals. I got nine and a half hours into this twelve-hour book, and just had to stop. I was so depressed I was ready to lay down and die. I\’d like to know how the story ends, but I may just look on Wikipedia to see if someone has posted a complete plot summary. I see that this book has gotten many positive reviews, and I don\’t doubt that this book deserves them. Before getting this book, you need to ask yourself how you react to detailed, historically accurate portrayals of life among the downtrodden. If you can read such stories with enjoyment, then this will probably be a good book for you. If you need your stories to cheer you up, then this book may not be right for you.

I\’ve been a lifetime fan of Mercedes Lackey, and while some of her stories are weaker than others, she remains one of the authors who I\’ll buy her stories if I only have enough for one book. Even if I\’ve already read it in one format or another. Her Elemental Masters series is my favorite of her many-imagined series, with this story being one of my favorites among these books. I\’ve been a member of Audible for years, and while I don\’t usually write reviews (who actually has time for that?) the various negative reviews irritated me enough to write to counter them. If you enjoy YA books, or Disney-esque good versus evil, I strongly suggest this book. Just enough darkness to make this into an entertaining literary meal, without being so dark as to make this depressing, or too light as to be a popcorn read. In short, the tone is right, the plot strong, and the character development believable.

So nice to read a fresh feeling story. Set in England and leaning on Hindu mythology, but not overly much; even that feels relatively fresh these days. Personally, I\’m tired of the current cookie-cutter zombie apocalyptic plague stories with monotheistic and/or political dogma, rampant with rogue vigilante anti-hero paranormals with dark pasts and forbidden/doomed fixations. This still has the traditional Good vs Evil thing going, but what are you going to do? A positive and relaxing reading experience, and I enjoyed the story as well as the characters. Mercedes Lackey is a wonderful storyteller and the narration by Michelle Ford was spot on, adding to the experience.

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