Debut author Jeff Zentner's The Serpent King is the mesmerizing story of three teenage misfits who band together in the Bible Belt town of Forrestville, Tenn.--a place Lydia Blankenship, for one, can't wait to escape when she graduates from high school. Lydia is a social-media maven who's bound for New York and a career in high fashion. Travis Bohannon's brutish father wishes he'd play football, but instead his sensitive son is obsessed with a fantasy series called Bloodfall, and is a sucker for anything with "the whiff of the firelit, ancient, and mysterious." Dillard (nicknamed Dill) Early--the grandson of the snake-obsessed "Serpent King" and son of a snake-handling preacher--is a talented singer-songwriter... and he's on edge.
Dill is so tense because he's living in the shadow of his preacher father, who was jailed three years ago for downloading child pornography. He's also secretly in love with Lydia, who is pushing him to go to college, while his mother wants him to drop out of high school to earn money for the family. His mother says, "You don't need options in life. You need Jesus. Options are fine if you've got them, but we don't." Dill feels he has to lie to his mother about everything, even his CDs that he tells her are Christian bands: New Order, he claims, is "the new order that Christ will create when he returns to Earth and reigns."
Told from a third-person point of view, this riveting novel takes turns zeroing in on each of the three friends as they navigate their families, school bullies, their search for identity and their dreams of a better life. Of the three, Lydia is the only one with supportive parents. Travis's father is a violent drunk--openly ridiculing his son for his "Dracula" clothes, his books, his weird friends, even for baking a cake. Is it possible that Dill and Travis will have a chance to "grow through the rocks and dirt" that their parents have piled on top of them?
Pens would run dry if readers were to underline extraordinary sentences--the kind that are so true, or funny, or beautiful that they clamp hearts. As Lydia blogs, "We live in a series of moments and seasons and sense memories, strung end to end to form a sort of story," and that's how The Serpent King feels. The "pounding, pulsing din" of an oncoming train triggers Dill's flashback to playing guitar in his father's church. Dill remembers that during his river baptism, he felt "free and clean," like he does when he looks into Lydia's eyes. The narrative swirls with the scent of shampoo, the stink of mold, warm evening winds, wood smoke, vultures turning in lazy circles. Zentner sings a song of deep pain and harsh reality, but also of fierce love and hope. And, as Lydia's father reminds his daughter, the friends who would "stand between you and a pack of lions" are the ones who really count. --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness
Shelf Talker: The son of an imprisoned, snake-handling Tennessee preacher and two other ostracized high school seniors band together in this extraordinary YA debut.