Girl, Serpent, Thorn by Melissa Bashardoust

2 stars! Spoiler free review!

Summary:

This is a Persian-fairytale-Sleeping-Beauty retelling of sorts. Soraya, hidden away her whole life because of her poisonous touch, realizes that for her to feel freedom, someone has to pay the costs. A demon has the answers she seeks. A boy speaks sweet nothings in her ear. Her family wants to keep her in the dark. All the while Soraya has to decide what she is willing to become to have the life that's evaded her till now... princess or monster.

Thoughts:

I wanted sooooo badly to liked this story, but I just couldn't. There's really no reason a 300-something page book should take me over 2 weeks to get through, and that's what happened here. I felt like I was dragging my feet to finish it because the story was dragging for me. Soraya was too wishy washy for me, she wanted to be bad and then wanted to be good, but could reconcile the two sides of her. Which ideally, would make for a very good character arc, but here something about the execution just made Soraya seem like the type you don't care to root for. The villain was predictable as anything, like from the first page he appears, you are immediately WARY because it's just too easy... Then there was this other boy Ramin who was unnecessarily nasty. And he was never redeemed. And so every time he was on the page I was just annoyed and that came without pay off. And Soraya's FAMILY. Gods, her brother was so flat. He had no personality. No reason for me to want him to succeed. Nothing, I remember nothing about him and I just finished the book 2 minutes ago.

The only, ONLY, saving grace about this book was the sapphic romance. You can see hints of it from the beginning if you don't already know about it going into the book, I did however. So I was waiting, and waiting, and waiting for it. And Parvaneh is my favorite of this whole book. She made it worth it because I loved her from the beginning. Loved her back story. Loved her strength and kindness and loyalty!

The ending was quite beautiful because of Parvaneh and because of how nicely everything wrapped up. But still very very very predictable. Which I guess is something you come to accept with some fairytale retellings.

Altogether 2 stars. Though I was hoping to loveeeeee it, this book just fell short.

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