It may have taken me a couple of months to finish this book, but I loved it!

It has everything you’d need to make a great mythical, present-day retelling of an ancient Chinese folktale: family dynamics, folklore, queer representation, women’s agency, and… snakes 🐍🐍

(Thank you so much, Ecco, Harper Audio, NetGalley, for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.)

Sister Snake by Amanda Lee Koe is a modern retelling of the Chinese folktale "The Legend of the White Snake." While I was previously unaware of the story, this book immediately made its way into my core that it felt like I had known it for years. It is a story that find two human sisters (who transformed from snakes hundreds of years earlier) reuniting in modern-day Singapore where their tightly established identities and sense of self are rapidly devolving. I loved the exploration of queerness, sisterhood, and the complexities of the human experience. Its darkly funny and filled with razor-sharp prose that reminded me a lot of Oyinkan Braithwaite's My Sister, the Serial Killer. Zoe Chao's narration of the audiobook was excellent and leant itself well to the cinematic scope and feeling.

Incredible and atmospheric. Having transcended their original forms as snakes, Emerald and Su have spent centuries calling one another “sister” and taking care of each other as family does. Their relationship holds a lot of past grievances, but when one is in trouble the other can’t help but come running to their aid.

A beautiful tale of the bond between two women and their separate but uniquely similar journeys to accept themselves as they are.