The town I grew up in was just this side of rural by the time I hit high school: they put up the first full stoplight (not just a blinking red or yellow) when I was in eighth grade. Our first McDonald’s came that year too, or the year after. I sometimes wonder what my life would have been like if we’d had the internet in high school. The internet was around when I was in high school, of course (I graduated in 2003). Everyone had an email address, and (more importantly) an AIM screen name. But the internet was dial-up, and unless you had two phone lines at your house, you couldn’t be constantly online or no one would be able to make calls. What I mean was if we’d had the internet like today, constant availability and access. I used books and movies to escape the limits of my experience as a high schooler, but if I were in high school today, I have to imagine I’d have been an active blog reader and probably a blogger myself.
Which is why I think I connected so hard with Lydia, one of the three rural Tennessee high school students at the heart of The Serpent King. Lydia reminds me of myself in high school…that feeling that you were destined for something greater than what Belle in Beauty and the Beast referred to as “this provincial life” (Belle’s kind of a snob when I think back to that movie). Thinking that you were smarter than the people around you, and that somehow made you better than them. While I had a little bit of a hard time buying that Lydia wouldn’t have at least some social interest from her peers solely by virtue of her fashion-blogger access to fancy things, she was such a well-drawn character and her emotional truth resonated enough to make this merely a quibble…
Full review can be found at: http://www.500booksblog.com/2016/03/book-15-serpent-king.html
