The Serpent King by Jeff Zentner
5 OUT OF 5 STARS.

“If you’re going to live, you might as well do painful, brave, and beautiful things.”

Goodreads Description: Dill has had to wrestle with vipers his whole life—at home, as the only son of a Pentecostal minister who urges him to handle poisonous rattlesnakes, and at school, where he faces down bullies who target him for his father’s extreme faith and very public fall from grace. He and his fellow outcast friends must try to make it through their senior year of high school without letting the small-town culture destroy their creative spirits and sense of self. Graduation will lead to new beginnings for Lydia, whose edgy fashion blog is her ticket out of their rural Tennessee town. And Travis is content where he is thanks to his obsession with an epic book series and the fangirl turning his reality into real-life fantasy. Their diverging paths could mean the end of their friendship. But not before Dill confronts his dark legacy to attempt to find a way into the light of a future worth living.

I’ve found that lately I haven’t been in love with hyped books. I tend to just find them “meh”.  That wasn’t the case for The Serpent King though and I am so glad that maybe I broke my hyped book curse! I laugh, I cried, I got angry. It tore me to pieces and I had to gather up all the pieces to try to put myself back together. It was happy, it was sad; it left me happy and sad. SO MANY FEELS. The last half of the book I had tears in my eyes until the very last word on the very last page.

There was a great cast of characters; Dill, Travis, and Lydia. They were best friends and completely different from each other. They also each had their own struggles and with what they were going to do after their senior year of high school and with things going on in their personal life. Some of them didn’t have the best home life and that was sad. They had each other though and they had an amazing friendship.

The book is told in multiple point of views of Dill, Travis, and Lydia. I don’t always like multiple POVs in books, but The Serpent King did it perfectly. I was able to connected with every single one of them and fell in love with them each of them. Sometimes it’s hard to connect with characters when there are lots of POVs, so I am glad I was able to with this one. There were some things that happened that I was completely shocked about and left my jaw dropped.

Overall, I really loved this book so much. I am so glad I finally found an amazing book to love. Lately the books I’ve been reading have been good, but not amazing and didn’t blow me away completely. This one did that though and I am so glad for that. Some characters needed saving and in the end this book may have been the book that saved me from my dreaded never-ending reading slump. I highly recommend this book.

Have you read The Serpent King? If so, what did you think? If not, do you think you will?

I have a couple more reviews to put up, but I have to figure out what to write for them. I’m drawing a blank on what to say and I guess I can’t figure out how to get my thoughts down into something that will make sense. It’s been so long since I’ve done a ton of reviews, so I need to figure it all out again lol. 😛

I hope you have a great day! 😀