I quite literally could not put this book down!!! I was gasping, screaming, sobbing, laughing, wondering.... And I can't imagine a more perfect ending to a beautifully crafted story and such vivid, memorable characters.

This one is a CAN'T MISS!

I love danmei and this was such a nice read. I'm a bit familiar with the folktale and reading this retelling was very nice. I enjoyed this book.

An enchanting and stunningly beautiful closed door mm romance. Highly recommend for anyone who loves oriental mythology.

A store favorite and a highly anticipated release! We love recommending this to fans who have eaten up the Danmei Light Novel genre.

dnf @ 33%


YA readers who like retellings, pick this book up!! While I did dnf this book, it's because I'm not the right reader for it -- not because it's a bad book, because it's actually a really GOOD book. (I'm just not the correct audience.)

I requested a copy because I really like this folktale and I thought it was super fun that the book is reinterpreting the tale with queer main characters. I'm not aware of any gay retellings of this tale (in English at least), so I thought this would be a fun ride.

And it is! I really like how it retains the atmosphere of a folktale while still very much feeling like a YA fantasy novel. The characters also manage to keep an aura of fairy tale around them, without feeling fully flat. This book is without a doubt one of the most successful folktale retellings I've read in YEARS.

But that being said, I'm definitely not a teen reader anymore -- so despite those successes, I decided to stop where I was. The book feels very YA (affectionate), and that's just not a style of story I really gravitate to anymore. But I know that I would have absolutely devoured this book if it had existed when I was a teen.

So if you ARE a teen reader or a lover of YA, you absolutely should check this book out!!

a queer retelling of a traditional chinese folktale with a lot of heart

it was fun to read, emotional at points, and i even cackled aloud at some of the humor. i never felt bogged down with worldbuilding or info dumping, and i loved the descriptions. it was also cool to have a lot of chinese sayings interspersed throughout.

i don't know the original story, but the pacing held up well throughout and the story never felt cliche or predictable.

an overall enjoyable read!

I dont read YA much anymore but After Fake Dates and Mooncakes Sher Lee had my heart I will read whatever they write. And this was so good. I adored Zhen so much, and the family he'd made for himself. Just the dynamic between Xian and Zhen was so fucking good the entirely time, the tenee secret keeping the utter desire how much you could tell each of them cared. And that ending! oh my god, I figured out what was happening long before Xian did and it still broke my heart.

Prince Xian hates snakes.Ever since his mother was bitten by a white snake and fallen ill due to the poison, he has been on a mission to help her. The only cure it seems is a mystical spirit pearl. A pearl Xian’s father had found, but Xian ended up losing to a white snake. Now, years later, Prince Xian is determined to save his mother and it seems the key to doing so is finding a white snake and using it to develop a cure. Zhen, a snake spirit who consumed Xian’s spirit pearl to gain the ability to change into a human form, is trying to reach Mount Emei to replenish his depleted life force. The two are fated to be enemies, yet when they meet the opposite occurs. Drawn to one another, Xian has no idea that Zhen is the snake who stole his mother’s spirit pearl, and Zhen has no intention of revealing the truth. These two seem doomed to heartbreak, yet there are other forces at play and hidden enemies around every corner intent on preventing Xian and Zhen from achieving their goals. Xian and Zhen soon discover there are few they can truly trust and that perhaps they aren’t too different after all.

This story was compelling, humorous, romantic, and at times, heartbreaking. I went through a multitude of emotions while reading this and enjoyed every moment of the ride. I cannot wait to see what the author writes next!

You don't know this, but I'm a big biiiiiiiiig s*cker for historical Asian royalty romance 😩 And this checked ALL my boxes lol!

Historical China? ✅
Mythology Retelling? ✅
Queer as f*CK? ✅
Cinnemon Roll MC? ✅✅

I just knew this book would be a banger ever since Sher Lee's debut Fake dates and mooncakes 🫶🏻 And she didn't disappoint. This was cute from head to toe (or rather head to tail?) and we have been BLESSED with the characters 😭 No spoilers on the plot, just, give this a chance please 🥹 You won't regret it!

Legend of the White Snake by Sher Lee is an intriguing retelling of the famous Chinese folktale, blending elements of romance, fantasy, and tragedy. The novel centers around the tale of a powerful white snake spirit, Bai Suzhen, who transforms into a woman and falls in love with a mortal man, Xu Xian. Their love, however, faces numerous challenges, including the disapproval of a Buddhist monk, Fa Hai, who seeks to break their bond.

Sher Lee does a commendable job of capturing the emotional complexity of the characters and their relationships. Bai Suzhen, in particular, is a compelling figure, torn between her love for Xu Xian and the consequences of revealing her true nature. The themes of sacrifice, loyalty, and the struggle between love and duty are explored in a way that keeps readers engaged.

However, while the book succeeds in drawing readers into the world of Chinese mythology, its pacing can feel uneven at times. The early chapters are strong, building tension and establishing the relationship between Bai Suzhen and Xu Xian, but some of the later sections can feel repetitive, with certain plot points being revisited without adding much new depth to the story.

5 stars

This was so much better than I had anticipated, and I thought it sounded pretty good to begin with. This gave me similar vibes as The Emperor and The Endless Palace by Justinian Huang, but YA, without the dreaded existentialism or multiple timelines, and with a much more happy ending. Xian and Zhen are such interesting and complex characters. They really hold up this story. The plot was super unique and intriguing as well. There's drama, mystery, politics, and romance. This story is definitely not one note, but so layered and with so much depth. I usually have different expectations for YA stories. It's a different genre and target audience, after all, so I just did not expect everything that I got with this story. I had so much fun and felt so much emotion while reading this. It's a journey and such an amazing one at that. This deserves way more hype, and I HIGHLY recommend this to everyone!

Let me start off by saying: I have mixed feelings about this book.

Mainly because I feel like this book is actually 2 books in one, and I felt that one part was done much, much better than the other. On the scale of myth retellings, Legend of the White Snake falls somewhere between romantasy and historical fantasy. There's a ton of embedded details about ancient Chinese culture, everything from proper tea steeping techniques to architecture to board games. This part felt a bit info-dumpy at times but was ultimately fascinating. I loved how vividly Lee brought the city of Changle to life; I'm obviously not the end-all-be-all on authenticity, but I usually am the first person to flag anachronisms and I couldn't really find any. The language is plainspoken but nobody in here speaks like a modern day teen, so huge points to Lee for that (it's one of my biggest beefs with YA historical of any flavor).

I also liked Xian, the young prince desperate to save his mother's life, and Zhen, his love interest. When Xian was a boy, a white snake bit his mother, causing her agonizing pain and paralysis; a magical pearl was meant to cure her, but just as Xian found the pearl, a white snake ate it. Unbeknownst to Xian, the pearl transformed the snake into a snake spirit, capable of taking human form. Years later, when a quest to cure his mother takes Xian to the city of Changle, he and snake spirit Zhen cross paths.

I'll admit, I wasn't expecting the dual POV of Xian and Zhen, nor the way I felt abruptly thrust into both stories. Everything until Zhen and Xian's meet cute felt very rocky -- there are flashbacks and time skips that aren't delineated well, dreams sequences that I am still unsure happened or not, and awkward introductions to side characters who later become important. But I did like the characters themselves, and, as stated, I loved the world Lee built, so I kept reading. After the meet cute in the palace stables, the plot itself felt much smoother.

But the thing I didn't buy into as the book kept going was the romance. It feels very insta-lust, and aside from the fact that both have rather hazy memories of their first encounter years earlier (Xian as a boy, Zhen as an ordinary snake), there was very little on-page connection. Let's just say that when a love confession happens, it was out of left field. For all the focus on lust, it felt like it almost wanted to be New Adult instead of YA (NA is a category I desperately WISH traditional publishing would embrace in lieu of smutty-ish YA books, but that's my own personal aside). I'm not saying a YA romance needs to be sweet and gushing -- like, please please offer all the flavors of YA romance for people to choose their own preferences -- but I guess I just wanted to feel the romance develop more. I wanted something to root for when the characters inevitably ended up at odds.

And, romance aside, I actually DID like both Zhen and Xian separately. The romance not working, to me, felt like an editing issue. Less repetitive passages, more time for the characters to interact. A longer timeline (it reads like less than a week in my version, with little temporal markers to tell us it's longer than that). A more earned resolution in the third act. Reading it as a historical fantasy-flavored myth retelling, I really enjoyed it. Reading it for the romance? Meh. I will still pick up another Sher Lee book, but I wasn't blown away like I was hoping.

Many thanks to NetGalley, Quill Tree Books (HarperCollins), and Sher Lee for gifting me this e-ARC in exchange for my honest review!

SCREAMING I love love and queer fiction and the more we see of it the better. please give me all of the queer fantasy!

This was my first experience with a retelling of a Chinese folktale and I loved it. It was so beautifully written. This was the first book in a long time to make me cry. I loved the relationship between Xian and Zhen and I was sad when the book ended. I definitely recommend.

To start, thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing an arc in exchange for an honest review.

I’ll preface my review by admitting that I’m not especially familiar with danmei as a genre or the white snake legend the story is based on, so if there were particular tropes or beats I was supposed to look out for, I wasn’t aware of if this story was hitting them or not. The story was cohesive and overall definitely felt very fairytale like, but I had some issues with it as well.

To start with the positive, I was really fond of Prince Xian and Qing as characters. Qing especially, I adored for her personality and was excited for every scene we got with her. I wish more time was spent exploring her character and relationships. Xian, too, was complex in a way that made it easy to grow attached of him.

Unfortunately, there were also a lot of things about this story that didn’t work for me also. It took me a long time to finish this novel because up until the last third, I just didn’t feel engaged with the story. Somehow, despite how fast-paced it is, I felt like the story was dragging and simultaneously, like things were being rushed along too quickly to be able to get attached to any of the characters very deeply.

The villian especially needed more fleshing because I didn’t see anything about him coming and not in a good way.

The romance aspect was very insta-love which simply isn’t my cup of tea. I could see two young men growing attracted to each other quickly and having a budding romance but when one’s internal monologue mentions leaving the city they met in after only two weeks when by the end, we are supposed to believe they have this soul level connection and being totally devoted to each other even past death, it becomes a little hard to suspend my disbelief.

The way the Xian and Shen cared for each other was truly beautiful but it all felt very surface level and I wished the story had dug deeper, given them more time to develop, and given the reader more to chew on. This book felt like it could have benefited from another 50-100 pages somewhere in the middle to build the tension between them and the conflict looming over their head.

a prince trying to cure his mother and a white snake that took something it wasn’t meant to, a love story that was doomed from the very beginning

“強龍難壓地頭蛇. “‘Qiáng lóng nán yā dì tóu shé,’” he read out in a quiet tone. *Even a powerful dragon struggles to overcome a snake in its native haunt.*

thanks to sher lee and harpercollins for sending me an ARC through netgalley. this does not affect my thoughts about the book in any way. out now!

this book was everything i could've ever asked for! the story, the characters, the plot, the setting, i felt like i was watching a historical cdrama 🥹 this is a Chinese folktale retelling, and i honestly will never forget this version 🫶🫶

xian, our prince who would do anything to protect the ones he loves and cherishes, ahhh, i absolutely admire him. and his determination to cure his mother was so cool! (even if that's why my heart broke midway 😭), i also adored his friendship with fahai (boy has to put up with this drama queen 24/7, and fahai deserves an award fr)

then there's zhen, oh my lil zhen 🥺 i would personally love to bubble wrap him up and put him somewhere no one can hurt him CAUSE BOY DID NOT DESERVE ANYTHING HE WENT THROUGH 😭😭 ms sher lee when i catch you!!! 😤 this little white snake who is clueless about human life, has a heart of gold and is the most wholesome character in the entire book has my heart and soul (he makes my older sister instincts flare up, u have smthg against him u go through me and xian 😌)

*But out here on their own, Xian and Zhen weren’t a prince and a snake spirit; they were two boys who would risk their lives for each other, again and again, without thinking twice.*
*“Zhī jǐ,” Xian whispered. “My soulmate.”*

these two together is the sweetest thing you might witness this century. the comfort and solace they provided each other has healed all my hearts wounds 💗✨ but obviously, a love story between the hunter and the hunted wouldn't end well, and this definitely went wrong, and NOOOOOOOOOO

the court politics, drama, and the betrayals that bleed into this story are top-notch! AND THAT GODDAMN TWIST?!? I DID NOT SEE THAT COMING FROM A 200KM RADIUS. like wdym??!?! WDYM, it was THAT person!!! i was simply speechless--

you should definitely read this book if you love:
🐍 chinese folktale retelling
💘 slow burn romance
🏮 dual POV
🍵 court politics
💔 lovers-to-enemies-to-(?)

A YA take on danmei novels, this was a fairly entertaining read. I am personally not a fan of insta-love, which this has. I feel like a lot of the relationship building could have been done beforehand, but when we do get it, it's pretty sweet. I loved the relationship and conflict between Xian and Zhen, but the plot around them was thin. I feel like if Lee had focused more on one central conflict, it would have been better, instead of including so many at the end when Xian and Zhen are still figuring out themselves. This was a fun to read novel, but I kind of wanted more from it.

Some of the characters were really interesting and I was especially intrigued by the myth and i liked the world itself, but I felt like it took me a long time to get into the story. I didn't feel sucked into the narrative. I thoroughly enjoyed the perspective of the precious slithering babies, but wasn't able to feel as connected to the prince.

Loved the story, the characters and the Chinese mythology. I am not familiar with the original story of the Legend of the White snake but I love retellings. While it was predictable at times, it didn't take away from the story. Their were twists and turns I didn't see coming. The last 15 percent was a roller coaster ride. The ending had me in tears. Another amazing book from the author of Fake Dates and Moon Cakes.

Thank you NetGalley and Quill Tree Books for an eARC in exchange for an honest review!

3.5!

Legend of the White Snake was a cute story that was easy to read, and was very fast paced and hit its beats well. Lee’s writing was easy to read and while I did find the story to have developed too fast for my personal taste, it was easily carried by the dialogue and relationship between characters outside of the romance. I don’t know how much I bought into the relationship by the end, but I thought he overall characters arcs were good and the ending made sense. The second half of the book didn’t feel as tight as the first half and some of the reveals felt a little… silly, I guess, but despite my little nitpicks, I thought that the overall story was fun and worth the read.