Name: The Serpent's Shadow
ISBN: 9780756400613

Mercedes Lackey

From the magical mysteries of India to the gaslit streets of Victorian London, Mercedes Lackey's unique departure from her Valdemar series follows a young woman doctor as she searches for the secret behind the sorcery in her blood.

The Serpent's Shadow

Kirsten Simkiss

I'm gonna be honest here. I didn't like the main character. Maya Witherspoon is a half-Indian, half-British suffragette doctor in the early 1900s. (If I remember correctly, the year is 1909.) As unlikely as it is that she would be able to come out on top of all that while living in London and be able to practice medicine in a prejudiced society is great! Unlikely, obviously, but it's fiction! It's great reading a novel with a person of color as the main character - it's not something you often get to see.

But she is very shallow. In fact, aside from her aunt, she is the only character described as being beautiful, including the men. And being beautiful itself isn't the problem. It's her internal monologue in chapter three (I think it was) where she described her best (and only) friend, Amelia, as someone who would never be pretty but that she would at least age well. Not only was that paragraph unnecessary, but it comes after Amelia compliments her beauty and comes off as immensely shallow and cold. It's great to have a main character that breaks the mold from being the white, pretty protagonist, but what good is it if she's horrid to her friends? She's also pretty selfish for someone who continuously is donating her time to clinics as a doctor. The people she seems to think she treats as family are essentially no more than servants. She does nothing to add to their well-being aside from keeping and housing them. 

She also is a very uncommitted suffragette to be someone who calls themselves a suffragette. Sure, she believes in women's rights, but aside from attending one parade at the behest of Amelia, she does nothing to fight for those rights aside from going about her daily life as a doctor. Sure, she's in a groundbreaking profession for women, but she's not fighting for voting rights, which is what the suffragettes were all about.

I did, actually, enjoy the "Twins", Peter Scott and Peter Almsley, as well as Gupta, Maya's loyal father-like figure in the absence of her own father. They all seemed like solid characters, albeit the latter two were a little one-dimensional for supportive characters.

The "pets", however, bothered me. For one, it's implied they are manifestations of the gods that are following Maya around because her mother is devout. Despite that Maya is not in fact Hindu and owes no allegiance to these creatures. It also seems that they don't age, so they're literally immortal pets that she can pass down to her children, despite that they may also be Christians. The Hinduism in this book is just not handled that well. At times, it's like an extension of an Indiana Jones movie. Other times, it seems almost entirely dismissed. It feels to me like the author wanted to take all the convenient fun things about Indian and Hindu culture while dismissing all of the less convenient things.

I also feel like the magic system is a little overpowered. Everybody seems to be a master almost as soon as they appear. Maya's so naturally skilled, which seems illogical to me, that she only needs minimal teaching from someone who isn't even in her own element. It just seemed like a cop-out. Everything just comes naturally to her. The only real obstacle to her well-being is her aunt, but otherwise she seems to face no real hardship than "evil magicians" and their nefarious ways. Sure, she faces discrimination, but it never really goes more than skin deep. It never affects her too badly.

Overall, I feel like it just needed more polishing. The writing is good in spots and plodding in others. Some chapters, I was happy to read through while others I wanted to stop reading two pages later.