The Silvered Serpents is Roshani Chokshi’s brilliant follow up to The Gilded Wolves. It picks up with the characters grappling with the extreme loss they face at the end of The Gilded Wolves. Fractured and confused, they go on one final, all important, mission. Matching the story’s darker tone is a setting shift from Paris to Russia, an icy world that is once more beautifully illustrated by Chokshi’s prose. My problems with this book are essentially the same as with The Gilded Wolves. First, the character ages do not at all align with how mature they feel. The author really should have just aged them up. Second, I felt that the magic system was very confusing and could have used a clear explanation.
To be perfectly blunt this book was emotionally painful to read. While The Gilded Wolves is fun and heartwarming, The Silvered Serpents is dark and melancholy. Everything that I’d loved about the first book, the characters and their relationships with one another, are put to the test in The Silvered Serpents. The Gilded Wolves gave us a group of people at their best and The Silvered Serpents puts these people through unimaginable trials and tragedy and leaves us to watch how they fare. But, despite all the difficult situations, the story and the writing are beautiful. While I probably won’t be rereading The Silvered Serpents any time soon, I eagerly await the next book in the series.
I rate The Silvered Serpents 4 out of 5 stars because, though it made me miserable, it also occasionally made me very happy. Essentially, it had me entirely under its spell, which is a powerful and rare thing. The Silvered Serpents is utterly enthralling, and I heavily recommend it and its predecessor, The Gilded Wolves, to anyone looking for an excellent read.