Dark Serpent

Celestial Battle: Book 1

By: Kylie Chan

Narrated by: Cindy Kay

Length: 15 hrs and 19 mins

Publisher's summary

The first book in best-selling author Kylie Chan's thrilling Celestial Battle trilogy.

When the ancestry of Xuan Wu's fiancee, Emma, is revealed, it threatens the harmony of the whole Celestial realm. The demons are gathering, powerful alliances are being made, and stone Shen are under threat. However, Xuan Wu is distracted - he must save Emma from the Demon King and give her the elixir of immortality, but at what cost?

Contains mature themes.

©2013 Kylie Chan (P)2020 Tantor

Reluctantly four star review

Honestly i feel like this book was more of a 3.5 book, but there is no option for that, so i had to ask myself if i enjoyed the book enough to give it a four rating and reluctantly decided that i had. Don't get me wrong i enjoyed the story, but i can't point to any one aspect of the book without adding some caveat about weird discrepancies or strange twists that seem to come out of nowhere. For instance Simone, cool Demigoddess of war, who worries about being immortal because she doesn't want to watch the people she loves grow old and die. Which would be great if she actually knew anyone who wasn't already immortal or going to be immortal. She constantly talks about wanting to be normal, yet does things that are guaranteed to make her feel as out of place as possible. Also Kylie Chan likes to say that Simone is the second most powerful thing in Heaven yet she is almost never used and when she is she is almost always instantly defeated. Heck Emma who is at least physically two times weaker than the Princess of war has far more wins under her belt than Simone. There is a lot of things that sound cool with Simone, but when the author actually stops telling us how awesome she is and actually tries to show us, it is rather disappointing. All of the characters in this book have weird inconsistencies like this, it's like the author wanted a lot of identity drama for some reason and most of the time it makes absolutely no sense. Speaking of disappointment, Kylie is back to her favorite method of dealing with a problem...SUICIDE!!! okay i am being a bit mean here and unless you read the book to the end you won't really know what i mean. But WOW, as a guy who loves Norse, Greek, and Roman mythology and was expecting some really cool history for Emma this book was a major let down. SIGH, sometimes i wonder why i keep going with this series. It has some serious issues that never seem to improve that much, or when they do the author will come up with all new weird issues that weren't even there before. This woman really needs proof readers who aren't family and friends. On the other hand i keep finding myself constantly checking to see when the next book is out and when i see it pop up i always get a little jolt of excitement, so there are compelling aspects to the books, they just get lost in all the...tangles of the mistakes.

P.S. Emma has some weird ideas for what counts as sisterly affection. Last i checked staring deep into someone's eyes until those around you are uncomfortable or spontaneous makeouts when your "sister" is about to do something dangerous, are NOT the hallmarks of sisterly affection. So why did Emma lie to Cla?rrissa?