Legend of the White Snake

Book Review 

Title: The Legend of the White Snake by Sher Lee  

Genre: Historical, Folklore, Romance, Queer 

Rating: 3.5 Stars 

I wasn’t aware of Legend of the White Snake before signing up for the tour, but regular readers of my blog will know I am huge fan of anything to do with Asian mythology and folklore. Some of my favorite books in the genre would be Daughter of the Moon Goddess and Wicked Fox so I was excited to pick this one up. Like Daughter of the Moon Goddess this is still a young adult novel at its heart, but it features all the hallmarks of the genre. For someone looking to break into Asian mythology and folklore especially Chinese dramas then this might be the book for you. I hadn’t read Sher Lee’s other novel, Fake Dates and Mooncakes but it is something I will seriously consider picking up in the future because of how much I enjoyed this one.  

Going into the book, I must agree with some other reviewers that the romance does feature insta-love, but in a lot of folklore this is a feature, so I wasn’t too bothered by it. However, there wasn’t much more development in the relationship after it is established. A lot of the relationship issues come from how deeply it is tied to the plot and how little development there is between Zhen and Xian. The stakes are quite high throughout the book, but I didn’t really like the aspect of Zhen hiding his identity from the person he claims to love. However, I do see how this will work for some and not for others and I personally fall somewhere in the middle as there were a lot of things I enjoyed but some I didn’t.  

Zhen and Xian do spend a lot of time together throughout the book and we are able to see a lot of their personalities individually as well as a couple. This helped me appreciate the romance more despite the insta-love and it was cute enough that it didn’t distract me too much from the story. One thing I did adore about Legend of the White Snake was the cultural aspects, as this is a retelling of the legend in Chinese folklore. One of the twists is that instead of there being a female snake spirit falling for a young man we have a male spirit falling for the Crown Prince. One thing I will add is that despite there being a lot of inspiration from Chinese culture, Chinese mythology and philosophy it can be a bit confusing if you aren’t familiar with the legend being told so I would advise looking that up before beginning the book.  

Overall, the characters and the relationship were good with some development, but the author could have taken some more time to develop the feelings between the characters and explaining the mythology a little more, so the reader doesn’t have to look up the legend in question. I personally found the author’s world building to have so much potential that was wasted here since the world building was severely lacking in places. That being said, these problems weren’t large enough for it to affect my overall enjoyment of the book, but it did leave me wanting a lot more than what I got in the end.