The Serpent King by Jeff Zentner

“And if you're going to live, you might as well do painful, brave, and beautiful things.” 

In the dark pinewoods about an hour outside of Nashville, there are three teenagers about to graduate. They are all dreamers, in their own way. Travis, a gentle giant who dreams of writing fantasy novels. Lydia, who runs a fashion blog and dreams of going to school in New York. And Dill Early Jr., who isn’t sure what his dreams are, just that they might involve music and not getting left behind by his friends. Jeff Zentner’s debut young adult novel The Serpent King is a Southern Gothic masterpiece and a heartbreaking coming-of-age novel.

Dill is the son of a Pentecostal snake-handling minister. When a scandal lands Dill’s father in jail, everyone in the town blames Dill, including his own mother. It takes friends as loyal and brave as Lydia and Travis to stand by his side and see his true worth. The Serpent King examines religion in all its multifaceted incarnations. The characters that Zentner creates are vibrant and real; they feel like people that the reader might actually know. The setting in this book is a live and breathing entity as well. The South, for all its prejudices, is a place of beauty. This story could not have taken place in any other location.

“Dill thought for a second. He looked out at the river, at its eddies and swirls, the patterns forming on its surface and disappearing. He listened to the ordered chaos of its sounds. The moon ascended, Venus beside it. On the horizon below, a radio tower rose into the indigo sky, its red lights blinking lazily. A warm evening wind carried a breath of honeysuckle and linden from the banks. A train whistled in the distance; it would soon rumble over them with sound like waking up to a thunderstorm. He was a tuning fork, made to resonate at the frequency of this place, at this time.”

Find yourself laughing, crying, and wanting to reread this book over and over again, with Dill, Travis, and Lydia along for the ride.  

Jeff Zentner lives in Nashville, TN.

A Fierce and Subtle Poison by Samantha Mabry

First lines can be powerful. They set the tone for the book, and every once in a while, they are so good that just reading that same line years later can remind you of where you were when you first read that story. 

The house at the end of the street is full of bad air. 

Samantha Mabry’s first line in A Fierce and Subtle Poison immediately transports me to the heat and island humidity of Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, where the croak of frogs fills the air and wildlife hides just beyond the fringes. 

Mabry’s choice of narrator is also interesting. This story could be told from an islander’s perspective, from a native puerto riqueño. Instead, she choose Lucas Knight, an outsider who is only half an outsider, with a foot in both worlds—the world where strange stories are cited as fact, where houses are cursed and girls go missing—and the world of his father, a tourist hotel developer from the mainland who could care less about marring the natural beauty of the island. 

Having grown up every summer in Old San Juan, Lucas has inherited the story of the house at the end of Calle Sol, where the superstitious señoras tell of a scientist who studies strange plants, whose wife was never seen, of a macaw who one day dropped dead of no reason. 

Anything that goes near the house at the end of Calle Sol ends up dead. 

As a child, Lucas threw a piece of crumpled up paper over the wall surrounding the cursed house. On it, he wrote,  “I wish I could lift the curse over the house at the end of Calle Sol so the birds would fly over it again.” 

And when girls from the island go missing and turn up dead on the beach, that same wish from years ago reappears in his bedroom, with new words written on it in blue ink: 

“So what’s stopping you?”

Lucas will have to uncover the mystery behind the house at the end of Calle Sol. In real life, curses are deadlier than in stories. 

Samantha Mabry 

The Dark Days Club by Alison Goodman

The Dark Days Club is Pride and Prejudice meets Sherlock Holmes with a dash of the supernatural, with more action to come in two more books. It’s early 19th century London, and Lady Helen Wrexhall is eighteen and on the eve of her debut presentation at the court of George III. In Regency England, “Queen Charlotte—after a two-year hiatus—returned to the practice of holding drawing rooms for the presentation of young ladies into high society. A battleground of a different kind.” 

Lady Helen is the daughter of parents accused of treason, especially her mother, Lady Catherine Hayden. She lives with her aunt and uncle who hope to arrange a suitable marriage for their niece without the past stain of her family. They also hope it is the Duke of Selburn, but the Earl of Carlston suddenly appears from being abroad, a disreputable character with a dark past and knowledge of her parents. He is the one who introduces her to the Dark Days Club, an underground organization that keeps otherworld and dark forces in England at bay. 

When mysterious disappearances and deaths start to occur, beginning with a serving girl in her own household, Lady Helen is keen to investigate, but at the same time must maintain a presence in the society circles and not be seen unchaperoned around the city…or worse, in the company of strange people. As her hearing sharpens and her reflexes quicken, she must handle society, suitors, and forces she does not understand. Can she make a suitable match and lead a double life fighting for the Dark Days Club? 

Goodman is an expert on the Regency period in England, so while The Dark Days Club has elements of fantasy, it is also firmly rooted in fact, which gives this book an edge. A fun read that will have you waiting expectantly for the second in the trilogy! 

Visit Alison Goodman's website to see her USA tour dates!