Book Review – The Serpent Bride

Author: Sara Douglass
Publisher: EOS
Binding: Paperback
Publication Date: May 2007

The Serpent Bride, the start of a new series by noted Australian author Sara Douglass, we see a melding of several different tales into something new. Set in the same world as her Wayfarer Redemption series, she brings back characters from that long series and combines them with characters from two of her standalones, Threshold and Beyond the Hanging Wall. There may be characters from elsewhere but I’ve certainly not read all of her books so am not familiar with all of her characters.

This is the story of an orphan, brought up by a religious order that isn’t well liked or understood, who is destined to be bonded in marriage with someone outside of the order. Since the Coil is the only life she knows, the outside world is both unfamiliar and frightening. As a priestess of the Coil she regularly slit open the guts of still alive humans to foretell the future in the coils of their intestines. Her final ritual is blessed by the serpent himself who tells her that she must marry an insignificant king in a far away land in order to fulfill her destiny. Terrified but obedient, she travels to Escator, negotiates a marriage contract and begins her new life as the Queen of Escator. Unfortunately for the newlyweds, an ancient evil in a far southern land has found a way to influence people enough to arrange the world into something he can work with and eventually escape his hated prison. While the myriad characters and gods we follow through the story are attempting to keep him safely contained.

I cannot pretend to have overly enjoyed this book. I found it dull and plodding with flat characters that were not interesting at all. From the overly gruesome opening scene…

Chapter 1, paragraph 3: “The foul liquid of rotting cadavers streaked her face and arms. For many days now the girl had crept about the house, seeking out the bodies of her parents (almost unrecognizable, four weeks after their death), rubbing the stinking, viscous liquid that had leaked from their flesh over her body, sucking it from her fingers.”

…to the anticlimactic ending, there were no really enjoyable moments. With the machinations of the gods that seemed implausible; the mishmash of old and new characters to the complete turnaround in character personalities, I could not find any one character to relate to or create a bond with. Thus I had a story I didn’t care about full of characters that in turn annoyed and bored me. Here’s an excerpt from the opening scene:

I apologize for anyone looking for a fully critical critique of the book but since I disliked it enough to immediately put it in another room when I was finished with it and repeatedly postpone my write up of it and refuse to carry it along to verify names and other miscellanea while finally writing it, my critiquing processes have clearly shut down. The only thing I can really say about the book is that I got the feeling as if she felt like combining all of these old used elements to create a completely new book because she did not have any new ideas and the publisher kept calling. Unfortunately, it wound up very much like the casserole mom used to make out of leftovers and oddments when we couldn’t afford to go to the grocery store; rather unsavory and unpleasant to get through.

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