Legend of the White Snake snuck up on me

 

A few months ago, I went to London for something, and I got to go to Gay’s the Word for the first time. Since then, I have been back to London for something else and maybe I did go back to Gay’s the Word, and maybe I did buy this book, Legend of the White Snake by Sher Lee, when I was there. I was in the shop, staring at the book, seeing that it was written by Sher Lee and thinking that the name seemed familiar. Turns out, Lee was the one who wrote Fake Dates and Mooncakes that I loved earlier this year.

Anyway, the blurb says that when Prince Xian was a boy, a white snake bit his mother and condemned her to a slow, painful death. The only known cure is an antidote created from the rare white snake itself. Desperate, Xian is determined to capture one himself and cure his mother. Soon, he encounters an enigmatic but beautiful stable boy name Zhen, and the two are immediately drawn to each other. But Zhen might just be the human embodiment of the white snake Xian is hunting. As their feelings grow deeper, will the truth about Zhen’s identity tear them apart?

You know how you’re allegedly not supposed to judge a book by its cover? Well, that's exactly what I did. I fully wouldn’t have even picked the book up if it didn’t look cool. But clearly, I picked it up and fully thought that blurb was a bit of me. I will also admit that one of the very first thoughts I had from reading the blurb was that this book just sounded like a BL series. That may have something to do with the fact I recently finished watching Century of Love, and to some extent, it gave of the same vibe as this book, or it could be that I’ve been seeing a lot of period BL advertised or coming soon recently.

We start seven years in the past where Xian is trying to get this item called the Spirit Pearl in an attempt to heal his mother. He’s on the cart, there’s an explosion, he jumps in a lake and sees something before passing out. You do later find out it was a white snake that swallowed the Spirit Pearl. In the first chapter, Xian and his eldest brother, Feng, are out snake hunting. Feng also does call out Xian for sneaking out of the palace so that he could go and hook up with this random guy who thinks he’s a tea merchant. There has also been this announcement put out that a member of the king’s court went to see an oracle who discerned that the cure for Xian’s mum was in this faraway city and land, so Xian immediately says he wants to go – to which his father obviously says no. Something I did appreciate was that instead of making Xian’s father immediately just the stern, unloving, type, he mentions the event from the prologue that had Xian’s mother’s snakebite, saying that he almost lost Xian, and would be horrified if that ever happened again. It was nice to see that even though, Xian’s father was stern, he was still a father – even though he let Xian go.

The book is dual POV, and a few chapters in it pops over to Zhen with this girl he’s picked up, Qing. They end up going into this tavern where these gross brutish men are clearly wanting to take advantage of Qing. They end up fighting, and Qing ends up biting the main man’s arm, and when she comes away, you see two punctures, almost like she has fangs. You see that he swallowed the Spirit Pearl, and it gave him powers as a snake, and that he ended up transforming Qing, who was a snake as well, into the same as him.

The two of them end up having a little meet cute in a stable when Zhen is working as a stable boy and cleans out the hooves of Xian’s horse. And in this moment, Xian is wearing just a plain robe, so when he talks to Zhen about the prince (aka himself), he ends up calling himself Xu so as to not reveal who he is. But obviously, Xian thinks that Zhen is cute. Then you have the obvious thing where they both know who the other is, because there’s no way they couldn’t. And the whole book just felt so BL coded – although, I do mean more BL TV show, rather than BL manga, as I’m not really knowledgeable when it comes to the mangas. Like, there’s a very particular formula that’s present when it comes to BL that you just know is going to happen. So like the blurb says, Zhen is the white snake that Xian is looking for, so of course that this is going to be the cause for conflict in the book when Xian has spent years hunting snakes in the name of trying to save his mother’s life.

Speaking of BL series, there’s occasionally a theme that happens within this series that is always the same. It’s that the series is top tier, right up until the leads get together but there are a few episodes left. It’s then those last few episodes that become messy and quite often just plain bad. I was so glad that this didn’t happen in this book. The romance leading up to Xian and Zhen getting together, chef’s kiss. And then because of the way that the end of the book went, there was more plot outside of the romance that hadn’t been resolved yet, and you know what happened? The plot continued when into more mess and conflict once the leads had gotten together. I’m not going to actually say what that mess and conflict is since I’m writing this part of the post less than a month after the book is out.

I also recently saw a TikTok, that part of me feels like I mentioned in my previous post, wherein a girl referred to herself as a book passenger princess. Basically, she doesn’t see anything coming and just takes a book for what it is and what it gives her. In that vein, this book definitely had some clichéd tropes in it, but I personally didn’t care. This is where being a book passenger princess hits. So what if a book has clichés in it? If the book is good and the clichés are done well, does it really matter? I personally vote no. Because for me, it doesn’t matter that the things that happen in a book have been done before, so long as they’re done well – like to me they were in this book – I really don’t care, and I will eat up those clichés every time.

There was a part of me that as I was reading, I found myself wanting more backstory to the leads, with Zhen – and by extension, Qing – I looked over it, because, despite being seventeen, they were also snakes, so a lot of their childhood is snake. Like, what are they going to do? Slither around. But that’s literally what was shown in the book, you were shown bits from when Zhen was a snake in the past – little excerpts from when he was born and a few of the things he did as a snake, and it was the same for Qing, too. Also, literally what do we know about the capability of snakes and their memory. But, for Xian, since his journey was ultimately all for his mother, I would have liked, even if it had been just slapped in a single chapter, maybe to have seen some more between Xian and his mother, especially from when he was younger. The whole incident happened when he was ten, but what about before that? And even in the years leading up to where they were now.

Anyway, that’s it. I know that I saw one of the very first tweets that Sher Lee twote from before Fake Dates and Mooncakes came out, and then I somehow completely missed this coming out until I spotted it on a shelf. But I enjoyed this so much more than Fake Dates and Mooncakes. I don’t know how to describe it other than the fact that this book just hit some vibe I love.

Okay, bye!