The Little Snake is a sharp, powerful tale that explores the relentless, horrifying nature of war and its unrelenting impacts on the young girl at the novel’s centre. It is a novel (novella?) that can be easily accessed by people of all ages but that does not mean, in any sense of the word, that its content could be considered easy reading. Instead, by allowing its narrative to be presented in a way that could easily fit into the definition of a modern-day fable, it allows the conception to follow that of the young protagonist whose experiences centre the book; revealing atrocities and the slow, incessant spiral into war through the naive, innocent mind of someone who should never have had to witness them. Its intricate rumination on human greed, war and senseless destruction pours doubt over the claim that we are living in the most peaceful time in human history, and that if we are, that can only be claimed as true in a western framework; thus, widening our conception of the world, drawing attention to the places both alike and distant from our own homes and how, until evil rises, no city or country is exempt.

A lovely fairy tale, unusual and happy and sad. When my kids are a little older I will definitely read this to them.

I clearly missed something in this book. I did not get it.
Obviously it's an allegory about life and circumstances in life but I just couldn't get into it. There may be one obvious issue that held me back here, and it's not the literary writing...

Personality of Snakes
I am a long time snake owner (10+ years). My husband and I have fostered over a dozen snakes over the years and had many of our own. Today we have 3 (an 18-yr-old corn snake, a 4-yr-0ld ball python, a 4-yr-old boa) and so I intimately know that snakes have personalities, and they are all different. No one snake is the same as another.
While the snake is the star of A. L. Kennedy's book The Little Snake; what it's really missing is a feel for the snake. I wanted to love this snake (even if his purpose in the world is dark), I wanted to connect with him and feel alongside him. I believe you are meant to sympathize with the snake and connect with him. For me it fell flat.
There were too many weird descriptions of the way the snake moved, changed and otherwise interacted with the humans it encounters. Now, before you get all upset with me, yes I know it's a mythical talking snake; and yes I get that it's fiction. But imagine a book where a cat or dog is the lead character and where the descriptions of the animal don't match up to what you personally know about that type of animal. Say they describe a dog that can't swim or a cat that likes water; you'd be put off too right? This is the kind of feeling I got about the snake.

Plot
It seems to be a theme lately with literary books that they are seriously lacking in plot. Something needs to drive the story forward and I'm getting tired of it being 'just because time passes'. This is really not a good enough reason for me. Existing is not plot. Even though this is a short story I'd have liked to see there be more purpose given to our characters (including the snake) so that it felt like the story was propelling forward.

Boring
Honestly, this was sooo boring. Even if I hadn't disliked the snake characterization I don't think I'd have liked this book. It was just dull, predictable and all around boring. It's not an original idea necessarily, we have lots of literary fiction about learning about love or pursuing a life built off love. And so I wanted more from this. There are a few quotable lines for sure; but this feels like a book written just to bore some poor future high school students into trying to find minding behind the words. *yawn* I just don't want to work that hard. A book can be an analogy or allegory, written at a high literary standard and still be interesting and readable. Unfortunately, The Little Snake is not one of these.

Overall
The best part of this book is that it's short. So If you really want to read it (even if you end up hating it) not a lot of time is lost. Perhaps for someone besides me this is a life changing book that connects with them in an intimate way. And if that is the case then I'm very happy it was written and so important to others. For me it just misses the mark in a lot of ways. But hey, it's short and I can't complain about that.

Please note: I received an eARC of this book from the publisher via NetGalley. This is an honest and unbiased review.

Starting very innocently by depicting the little snake as a secret companion, this novel goes much deeper and is quite touching at times. It becomes apparent that the snake acts as a personification of death, sort of a grim reaper that comes to learn about human emotions and particularly love and grief.
I’d really recommend this to anyone, it kept me hooked and intrigued as it was a lovely read.

A.L. Kennedy serves such simple, but powerful story of human cruelty, often absurd behaviour, but also story about worth of friendship.

The Little Snake is a charming little fable that could be read by someone of just about any age. I could see reading this at different points in time, because the message will be perceived so differently depending on your place in life.

This is one of those stories that is difficult to explain; its beauty lies in the telling more than the actual plot. It's a story about discovering friendship, learning about humanity, and recognizing the cruel truths of life.

But most of all it's a story about love.

"...[She] told him quietly, 'Love is a terrible thing.'
'So it seems,' whispered Lanmo.
'But it is also wonderful.'

And that, my friends is the truest thing I know. 4.5 stars rounded up for this little gem of a story.

Thank you to NetGalley and Canongate Books for providing me with a DRC of this book.

What an utterly charming, little read! This held in its pages pure magic, the likes of which I have not had the pleasure of reading since The Little Prince. It managed to perfectly capture the breath-taking beauty of a withheld belief in magic, with a moralistic undertone that gave this a painfully poignant edge.

DEspite an acknowledgement to St Exupery, it seems to me there’s more than a flavor of Kipling’s Just So Stories to this sweet, savvy, heartbreaking fable of love and human nature. Kennedy is a talent, and her short fairystory is deft and funny, just the thing for adults with children in mind.

This dark little novella is the story of freedom and hope. The clear hints and comparisons to Le Petit Prince are obvious to readers, but that doesn't make it any less amazing.

Mary has a new friend, Lanmo, a beautiful snake full of intelligence and loyalty. Lanmo has the air of death, as he visit those at the end of their life, but when the real wolf threatens Mary more than Lanmo ever could, we see the effect humans have.

This is a beautiful story for adults and children.

Thanks to netGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this book.

What a fantastic book, very imaginative, a breath of fresh air to read, perfect for lovers of fantasy and whimsy can't wait for the next one

I received a copy of The Little Snake from NetGalley and Canongate Books in exchange for an honest review.

The Little Snake was a short and bittersweet read, a dark fable which shows a terrifyingly familiar world through the filter of innocence at first, a picture which gets clearer and more heartbreaking as Mary, the main character, grows up. The beginning of the book depicts Lanmo, the titular snake, as he begins to form a strange bond with a kind and clever little girl, the aforementioned Mary, whose pure heart and inquisitive nature causes her to extend friendship to the snake, instead of the fear and horror most people would feel in the face of such a creature. The snake, however, is not a mere snake; he is a personification of death. Lanmo is neither evil nor good, instead he is fair and neutral, at least up until he encounters Mary. The girl is a beacon of hope and love in a darkening world, and her goodness manages to touch Lanmo, and through the filter of unconditional love changing his view of the world. It is a sad story, but it is also beautiful and full of hope, and I cannot imagine anyone reading it and not enjoying it.

"They should fly kites, he thought. They should play with cats and eat ice cream and bake bread and dance with each other and sing and they should marry each other and perhaps make intelligent children who understand things, or adopt children who are orphans and have nobody for them in the world. But he knew that he could not change the humans against their will and that the humans could only choose to change themselves and so he must leave them to be lost in their own ways."

This was a strong, elegant novella. The narrative is almost childlike in it's prose; and also like a child, it grows and develops into something more. Once I was fully immersed - which did not take long - it felt like I was reading an old fable, one that was simultaneously saddening and comforting.

However, unlike any older fairytales, like the Hans Christian collection, or the Grimm brothers' stories, this novella avoids anything lewd, anything unnecessarily violent, and instead decides to relay a message, as with so many other tales, I thought that the moral of the story I was getting with this book was less of a moral and more of a one-word practice;

balance.

"'I do not understand humans. Some of you will steal anything all the time and some of you will steal nothing all the time. Couldn't all of you just steal something more of the time - if you need it?'
'I don't think so.'
'But you are hungry and other people have more food than they can eat.'
'Yes, but that is the way of the world.'"

This book was engaging and I feel like it will be enjoyed by both adults and children.

Thank you to Net Galley for an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

The Little Snake conjures a character that undergoes a remarkable transformation. The snake, in all of his metaphorical glory, meets humans at the end of their journey. One day, a young girl, not scheduled for a meeting with this reptilian grim reaper, notices and befriends him. The snake, Lanmo, vows to protect the girl, Mary, and in the spirit of friendship, both of them look out for each other. Over Mary's life, we see how Mary's fortunes fall and Lanmo find himself with fewer readings to perform as humans take each others' lives more and more often. This bittersweet fable had me weeping by the end.

I want everyone to know that I'm writing this review through a curtain of tears, okay.

Lanmo, our polite little grim reaper, has never known love or happiness or peace; he's never known sorrow or guilt or heartache. All he's ever known is he's the most powerful being there is and as such he has a duty to travel the world and snuff out - very politely, if deserving; very menacingly, if deserving - the lives of those whose time has come. It's all he's known and so he carries out his tasks very clinically and methodically.

Then he meets Mary, a young girl whose heart bursts with hope and optimism and love and joy, she whom embraces her emotions and feelings and finds loveliness in even the saddest of moments, is able to so seamlessly embrace the bittersweet nature of life and in doing so is able to depart wisdom onto Lanmo, the wisest, most powerful snake of all.

Through their journey together, Lanmo sees the world change: he sees cities rise and fall, desolation creep across once thriving fields of verdant grass and splendid flowers, sees humans grow thin and hollow and weak. He finds his occupation needs his attentions less and less - as cities crumble, so too does the morality of man, and humans continue finding new and inventive ways to carry out his reaper business themselves.

Where once Lanmo might stare at these changes with a disinterested air - after all, it's not his business - he finds himself paying more attention. He sees beauty in the bright eyes of children, love in the dances of couples standing together 'neath a blanket of stars, hope and perseverance in the stolid flight of red kites against the backdrop of the clear, blue sky. He feels guilt and finds that he doesn't quite like it, but that he feels it so intensely because it is the result of an abundance of love.

We journey with Lanmo as he realizes all of these wonderfully divine, beautiful things - as he ponders why the humans attack each other when they could instead dance and make merry and fly kites and bake bread.

We journey with Lanmo as he realizes that love, more than anything, is the strongest force there is - a glue that binds souls together, that does not possess, that mends and nourishes and grows stronger and stronger than the most powerful reaper there ever was.

This was... a beautiful, heart-wrenching fable. I feel fuller having read it, and upon its publication I am going to order several copies for my store and keep them on my recommended shelf. The descriptive language offers an incandescent fairy-tale feeling and provokes strong visuals in the reader, making it a quick but fulfilling read. I might also recommend that several of my teacher friends' look into teaching it in their classrooms: it's an important commentary on society and culture, and one that's very relevant in today's climate, but more than that it's a timeless tale on the importance and richness of love.

I have many feelings and not enough words to actually express them after reading this. Which is kind of amazing considering it wasn’t even a full 200 pages of a story.

The story follows a girl named Mary, but also a snake named Lanmo that wanders the world and does not have a heart until one day, it beats because he realizes and understands that what he feels in him for Mary is love, but he has to continue doing what he does because that has always been his lot in life.

It doesn’t make much sense when you realize that I’m talking about an actual talking golden snake that visits an imaginative child one day in her small garden, but it also does in that death comes in a lot of different forms.

The prose is beautiful and mesmerizing, holding a consistent tone of storytelling very reminiscent of Leigh Bardugo’s style, especially The Language of Thorns. It reads very similarly and considering TLoT has been one of my favorite reads this year and I would lay down my whole heart for Leigh Bardugo’s writing, it carries weight to me when I say that this is just as beautiful and elegant and immersing.

But as well as eloquent storytelling, the actual depth of the story makes my whole heart ache. I went into this with the vague idea that it wouldn’t be entirely a story about happiness and mythical creatures, but I also didn’t expect the onslaught of emotions that came with it either. It’s a deeply emotional and moving story in a lot of ways, from the childlike innocence of Mary even as she grows older and the heartbreaking love Lanmo grows to have for Mary and the things she loves, too. It shows a lot of complex facets to humankind that are ugly when analyzed and distressing at every glance because it’s also about a city that loses its life and richness as years pass, which leaves once happy people struggling and tired and broken.

There’s a lot of elements to this story and like I said, it’s almost amazing that so much emotional depth could be fit into a story that consists of less than 200 pages, but Kennedy did it and quite effortlessly at that. It’s a beautiful and magical book that’s not only about the imagination, but also the simple cycle of life and death and all the things in between and how human it is to love and be loved.

It is absolutely worth a read and I’m very, very happy that Netgalley let me have it.

Damn you, A L Kennedy, for making me cry on the Manchester to Euston train. I snuffled away the journey behind a pair of sunglasses.

This is a beautiful jewel of a book, as sparkling as the ruby-red eyes of Lanmo, the titular hero. A modern fairytale about the power of love to transform lives, it describes the various encounters between Lanmo and Mary, a young girl living in an unnamed city, throughout her life.

The true nature of Lanmo emerges with the tale and makes his relationship with Mary more surprising, raising questions about why this seemingly ordinary girl causes such a response from the snake. This is book that challenges the values attributed to possessions - the beautiful possessions and houses of the rich people in the city are unloved whereas Mary finds wonder in the sound of a leaky pipe dripping into a bowl. The clearest expression of this comes in the recurring motif of kites, because that is where freedom and magic lies.

"She was standing looking at the kites, free in the blue, blue sky and thinking that to love something did not mean that she could own it."

The narrative voice familiar in fairytales - that omniscient third person combination of deity and parent, who hints at future events and special insight - is a comforting presence here, and that is important because the themes of the book are serious, covering war, genocide, love, death, social and wealth inequality. I also loved the use of simile, the oldest form of figurative language but perhaps seen as a sophisticated manner of expression.

"The girl also watched her breath appearing in ascending, steamy clouds, as if her body were somehow burning the dead leaves from autumn, or perhaps washing a large number of sheets and producing steam like a laundry."

It reminds me of reading epics such as The Iliad or The Odyssey where human stories have universal themes. This style is self-conscious and may be an acquired taste, and the reader needs to buy into this voice fully to enjoy the tale.

The Little Snake makes you think. One of the most telling episode describes the way in which a refugee is welcomed in a new and strange city, when a woman offers a slice of fruit expecting no payment in response. That touched me and made me reflect on what kindness looks like. In our real life world, refugees are demonised and strangers distrusted - we still fall short of the standards of life that A L Kennedy captures in this book.