Queer-rom, literate characters, revenge
Serpentine Valentine
by Giana Darling
BC: Giana Darling Publishing, 2024
$24.95 / 9781774440469
Reviewed by Jessica Poon
*
Giana Darling’s Serpentine Valentine is a novel that shares DNA with the audacious film Promising Young Woman, only with snake tattoos and group vigilantism.
Alexandra “Lex” Gorgon is a mesmerically beautiful scholarship student at Acheron University. She’s only too happy to have escaped rural Virginia and her “doomsday prepper parents who didn’t believe in education.” Professor Morgan is an archetypal sleazy academic, referred by others as Professor McDreamy. He expresses skepticism when Lex tells him she’s lesbian. Lex, though, understands the sad reality that “a lot of people seemed to struggle with women liking women. Especially if we only liked women. Bisexual women were often unfairly sexualized and objectified by men, but at least they were ‘understandable’ in the male mind.”
Lex and Professor Morgan regularly discuss classics together over jasmine tea, having differing opinions on whether Achilles and Patroclus were romantically involved (personally, I always believed they were). Eventually, Professor Morgan asks Lex to become his assistant, which she accepts. Lex comes to think of him as as a father figure.
When Professor Morgan drugs and rapes Lex, her experience of academic bliss rapidly disintegrates. The scene is not rendered graphically, but it is effective in evoking Lex’s despair and sense of betrayal. Lex will not, however, be silenced. She confides in the university’s President, Mina Pallas, a champion of Lex and her strong academic performance. In a bid for career ascension, Mina takes Professor Morgan’s side and Lex becomes an outcast.
With embittered pragmatism, Lex enacts revenge. She will punish rapists, with the help of her feminist friends. She will also seduce Mina Pallas’s daughter, Luna, a popular, beloved blonde girl with a steady, seemingly perfect boyfriend. Given the prevalence of bi-erasure, I appreciated that Luna discovering her bisexuality is written about with sensitivity.
The apparent magnitude of Lex’s and Luna’s beauty is such that I was reminded of Lauren Oyler’s remark: “I get the sense she must feel overwhelming pity for ugly women, if she has ever met one.” Of course, the extreme physical attractiveness of main characters is an undying, long-standing tradition for a simple reason—people love pretty people.
Lex’s seduction is far more seamless than anything Freddie Prinze Jr. tried in She’s All That—it helps that Luna was already aesthetically enamoured. The evolution of their relationship leads to certain dénouements.
It’s not difficult to predict the novel’s trajectory—a personal revenge mission quickly morphs into a connection unprecedented by the characters but easily predicted by the readers. There is a library scene reminiscent of Mila Kunis and Zoe Saldana in After Sex and, to whom it may concern, there’s also a bathtub scene. If anything, I wanted the novel to lean more into Lex’s morally indefensible, trauma-inspired revenge on an unwittingly innocent girl experiencing a bisexual awakening. What if Lex hadn’t fallen for Luna? But that would be, perhaps, too dark a tale.
That being said, there is ample darkness in the novel. Darling does not restrict cruelty to her male characters, but shows how frequently women, too, are abominably complicit in victim-blaming and slut-shaming. Misogyny, internalized misogyny, power imbalances, sexual assault, and illegal revenge are all prevalent. To off-set that darkness, west coast islander Darling also depicts the significance of a chosen family, the power of self-acceptance, and being comfortably queer in the midst of homophobia and potential ostracism. Most of the light in the book comes from Luna, who is, rather cornily, given the Latin-inspired nickname of “Lux.” Given that the two women recite Shakespeare to each other, the nickname makes sense, making them Lex and Lux.
There isn’t nearly as much Medusa as the title might suggest, but nevertheless, it’s always welcome to have Medusa regarded sympathetically, rather than being unfairly characterized as a powerful lunatic man-hater. Medusa, wrongly punished for Poseidon’s sins, perfectly parallels Lex.
If you’ve grown weary of heterosexual couples where the woman, wetter than a seal in a monsoon, comes effortlessly from the sheer power of a glistening mammoth cock from a handsome man, and you like the idea of a Sapphic romance involving literate characters who casually recite passages from The Merchant of Venice, then Serpentine Valentine by Giana Darling (Dead Man Walking) will prove a potent antidote.
*
Originally from East Vancouver, Jessica Poon is a writer, former line cook, and pianist of dubious merit who recently returned to BC after completing a MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph. [Editor’s note: Jessica Poon has reviewed books by Umar Turaki, Katrina Kwan, Jane Boon, Terese Svoboda, Maia Caron, Wendy H. Wong, Andromeda Romano-Lax, Sarah Leipciger, Katrina Kwan, Shelley Wood, Richard Kelly Kemick, Elisabeth Eaves, Rajinderpal S. Pal, Keziah Weir, Amber Cowie, Robyn Harding, Roz Nay, Anne Fleming, Miriam Lacroix, Taslim Burkowicz, Sam Wiebe, Amy Mattes, Louis Druehl, Sheung-King, Loghan Paylor, Lisa Moore (ed.), Sandra Kelly, and Robyn Harding for BCR]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-25: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
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