Girl, Serpent, Thorn Review: Is It Worth Reading?

Verdict: A dark, Persian-rooted fairy tale with a poisonous princess worth rooting for and a sapphic romance that wins in the end, held back by twists you can see coming and a love story that gets less room than the cover suggests.

Best for: Readers who want a morally grey heroine and myth-heavy YA fantasy first, and who are happy for the romance with Parvaneh to sit in the second row rather than run the show.

Heat level: ★☆☆☆☆ (1/5: glimpses and kisses)

Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.5/5: a 3.64 Goodreads average across roughly 43,000 ratings, two starred trade reviews, and a steady complaint that the twists telegraph themselves)

Tropes: Cursed princess, monster heroine, morally grey protagonist, captive and captor, human and demon romance, apparent love triangle, fairy-tale retelling, palace intrigue, dark fairy tale, bisexual heroine.

Girl, Serpent, Thorn by Melissa Bashardoust is a standalone young adult sapphic fantasy from Flatiron Books, set in a kingdom built from Persian myth, where a princess whose touch kills has spent her life hidden in the palace, and where the only person who might know how to undo that curse is a demon chained up in the dungeon below her.

It sits at 3.64 on Goodreads across about 43,000 ratings, picked up starred reviews from Booklist and School Library Journal, and made Booklist’s Top 10 Fantasy and Science Fiction for Youth list in 2020. That’s a strong trade record next to a reader average that’s only middling, and the gap is the interesting part. Fans of Bashardoust’s first book, Girls Made of Snow and Glass, will recognise the pattern.

What Is Girl, Serpent, Thorn About?

It’s a fairy tale first and a romance second, and you should go in knowing that. Bashardoust pulls from the Shahnameh, Zoroastrian ideas about good and evil, and a Sleeping Beauty skeleton, which School Library Journal and the book’s own afterword both lay out. The world is invented, not modern Iran, but its demons, its gardens and its royal family all come from that tradition. Kirkus files it for ages 12 to 18, SLJ for grades 6 to 8, and Flatiron sells it from its adult list, so it lands somewhere in between.

Soraya is the shah’s twin sister, and the thing she lacks is simple: contact. Poison runs in her veins, so she lives in the shadows of the palace while her brother rules in the light. Parvaneh is a parik, a female div, held captive below, and what she assumes is that Soraya is just another royal who sees her as a monster. The book stays close on Soraya the whole way through, which is why her bad decisions hit so hard. You’re inside every one of them.

What Makes This Sapphic Fairy Tale Fantasy Work

The Persian mythology: The most praised element across trade reviews and reader reviews alike. Kirkus calls the world textured and evocative, and readers keep naming the div lore as the reason they picked it up.
A heroine who’s allowed to be wrong: Soraya makes real mistakes with real costs. Kara Babcock calls her unlikable but not unsympathetic, and that’s the line most fans draw too.
The human and demon pull: A princess and a captive div is forbidden love with teeth. Publishers Weekly singles out the connection between Soraya and Parvaneh as the stirring part.
The structure: Several reviewers point out that the opening is a prelude to a second story, which turns into a third. Locus calls it twisty and well paced.
Bi representation without apology: Soraya’s attraction to a man and to a woman are both treated as real, which Reactor’s reviewer flags as the book’s quiet strength.

Book Synopsis

Soraya has never touched anyone without hurting them. A curse laid on her family before she was born made her skin a weapon, and her mother and brother solved the problem the only way a royal household knows how. They hid her. She has her rooms, a garden, and the habit of watching the court from places nobody thinks to look. Her twin brother has a throne, a court that adores him and a life in daylight.

Then two things happen at once. A div is captured and locked in the palace dungeon, and Soraya learns the creature may know something about the curse that her family never told her. And a young man named Azad, newly arrived at court, looks at the poisonous princess without flinching. For a girl who has spent her whole life as a rumour, being seen is almost more dangerous than being touched.

Soraya starts going down the stairs. Parvaneh, sharp and patient and in no hurry to help a shah’s sister, has her own reasons for every answer she gives. Soraya starts lying to her family, to the court and to herself. The question that drives the rest of the book is the one the cover asks: whether she’s going to end up the princess in this story or the thing everyone in it is afraid of.

My Review

I came away thinking Soraya is one of the better YA heroines of the last few years, and I want to say that before the reservations. She’s lonely in a way that makes her stupid, she’s jealous of people she loves, and she makes one decision that most writers would never let their heroine make. Bashardoust doesn’t excuse it. She makes Soraya pay for it and then fix it, slowly. That’s the backbone of the book and it holds.

The world is the other thing it gets right. The div are frightening and strange, the palace feels lived in, and the mythology isn’t decoration. It drives the plot. Booklist’s starred review praises how the prose digs into motive and manipulation, and that matches what I’d tell a friend: this is a book about who lies to whom, and why.

Where it struggles is surprise. The most repeated complaint in the reviews I read is that the twists are visible from a distance, and it comes up in about seven independent places, from Goodreads one-star reviews to Publishers Weekly, which says the foreshadowing is too heavy. Kirkus adds that the prose can get heavy-handed and the emotional turns arrive abruptly. Around that sit the secondary problems. A slow first stretch (one fan admits the first 10 to 15 percent is easy to put down). A side cast that gets very little room, with Laleh and the general Ramin getting about two scenes each by one reviewer’s count. And some fairy-tale convenience in how things get solved at the end.

One expectation to reset: the marketing leans on the young man, and at least two reviewers, at The Library Ladies and at Locus, say the jacket copy suggests a love triangle the book doesn’t really deliver. The romance that matters is with Parvaneh, and it gets less page time than a romance reader might want. If you’re here for a sapphic romance first, go in calibrated. If you’re here for a dark fairy tale with a queer heroine, you’re in the right place.

My honest note: A sharp, myth-rich fairy tale with a heroine who earns her redemption, and a romance that wins without ever taking over. If predictable twists ruin a book for you, this one will sting. If you read for character and atmosphere, it’s worth the trip.

Element	In Girl, Serpent, Thorn
Central relationship	Soraya and Parvaneh: a cursed princess and a captive parik, with Azad as the apparent rival
Core tropes	Cursed princess, monster heroine, morally grey lead, captive and captor, human and demon romance, fairy-tale retelling
Setting	An invented kingdom drawn from Persian myth and the Shahnameh, mostly inside the royal palace
Heat level	1/5: glimpses and kisses
Series	Standalone, with a resolved ending and no sequel
Content notes	Death and violence, confinement, blood, emotional abuse and a toxic relationship, family betrayal, off-page torture, body horror

How Spicy Is Girl, Serpent, Thorn?

Barely at all: 1/5. romance.io rates it “glimpses and kisses”, its lowest band, from a small pool of 41 ratings, and no reader I found describes anything more than kissing. School Library Journal puts it neatly: the sexual undertones are strong but “kept between the lines.” The tension comes from touch itself, since Soraya can’t have it, and that does more work than any sex scene would.

The thing worth flagging is darkness, not heat. StoryGraph readers list death, confinement and violence as graphic, plus blood and emotional abuse at a moderate level. Nobody I found flags anything sexual beyond kissing. For the same closed-door band in YA, This Poison Heart and Cinderella Is Dead sit right alongside it.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you want a heroine who gets things badly wrong and has to earn her way back, you’d love fantasy built from Persian myth rather than European fairy tales, you’re happy with a closed-door romance, and you like a book that finishes in one volume.

You may want to skip it if: you guess twists early and hate it when you do, you need the romance to be the main plot, you want a full supporting cast with lives of their own, or a slow opening stretch makes you put books down.

In short: a strong heroine and a beautiful world in exchange for a plot that rarely surprises seasoned fantasy readers.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (November 2026)

This isn’t a book having a moment right now. It came out in July 2020 and has been piling up readers ever since, and web searches turned up no BookTok spike tied to it. What it has instead is staying power: about 43,000 Goodreads ratings, more than 8,000 reviews on StoryGraph, and a spot on a lot of sapphic and queer YA reading lists. The trade record helps. Booklist and School Library Journal both starred it, Booklist named it one of 2020’s ten best fantasy and science fiction titles for youth, and Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Horn Book and Locus all reviewed it well. I couldn’t pull Reddit threads or Amazon’s star breakdown this time, so this section leans on Goodreads, StoryGraph and the trade and blog coverage.

The audiobook is a real option here. Nikki Massoud narrates the Macmillan Audio edition, which runs 10 hours and 6 minutes, and Audible listeners single out her performance, including her pronunciation of the Persian names and words.

Prefer audio? Listen to Girl, Serpent, Thorn on Libro.fm, the audiobook shop that supports independent bookstores.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The Persian mythology, first and almost without exception. “Immersive” and “lush” are the words that keep coming back, and even negative reviewers credit the lore. Soraya comes second. Readers like that she’s morally grey and still has a good heart, and The Nerd Daily’s reviewer says she ended up feeling sympathy for the villains too. Then the twists, for the readers they caught off guard: The Lesbian Review called it one of its favourite books of 2020 partly because the villain and the love interest both surprised it. And the bi representation in a Persian-coded cast gets steady credit, with one two-star reviewer admitting the sapphic thread was the only reason they kept reading.

What readers argue about and complain about: Predictability, above everything. Readers call the plot convenient, the villain obvious and the resolutions too easy, and PW’s note about heavy foreshadowing says the same thing in trade language. Second, the opening. Several readers needed days to get invested, and one blogger calls the book oddly balanced, with the first half telling one story and the second another. Third, the supporting cast. Laleh, Ramin and the rest stay thin, and fans who loved the book still wanted more of Laleh. The splits are real, though. Some readers call the world underbuilt while Kirkus and Locus praise it, StoryGraph voters rate the pace fast four times as often as slow, and the romance reads as stirring to PW and underdeveloped to a handful of low-star reviewers. Goodreads shows the shape of it: 57% of ratings at four or five stars, 31% at three.

The standalone question worth asking first: It resolves completely. There’s no sequel and none announced, and the Goodreads author page lists nothing new from Bashardoust. If you want more, her only other novel is Girls Made of Snow and Glass, a Snow White retelling that sits a little higher at 3.76 on Goodreads but keeps its sapphic romance even further in the background. For this one, Soraya and Parvaneh end the book together.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Girl, Serpent, Thorn a sapphic romance?

Partly. It’s a fantasy first, but the romance that lasts is between Soraya and Parvaneh, and several reviewers confirm they end up together. Readers who wanted a romance-led book often say it gets less page time than they hoped.

Is there a love triangle in Girl, Serpent, Thorn?

Only on the surface. Soraya is drawn to both Azad and Parvaneh, but Locus and The Library Ladies both say the jacket copy promises a triangle the book doesn’t really deliver. The woman is the endgame.

How spicy is Girl, Serpent, Thorn?

A 1/5. romance.io rates it “glimpses and kisses,” and School Library Journal describes the sexual tension as implied rather than shown. There are no explicit scenes.

Is Girl, Serpent, Thorn a standalone?

Yes. The story finishes in one volume with no cliffhanger, and as of November 2026 no sequel has been announced.

Is Girl, Serpent, Thorn YA or adult?

Mostly YA. Kirkus lists it for ages 12 to 18 and SLJ for grades 6 to 8, though it’s published by Flatiron Books and plenty of adult readers pick it up. It’s darker than most middle-grade shelves, with violence and death on the page.

Is there an audiobook?

Yes. Nikki Massoud narrates the Macmillan Audio edition, which runs 10 hours and 6 minutes. Listeners praise her performance, especially her handling of the Persian words.

If You Loved Girl, Serpent, Thorn, Read These Next

Start with This Poison Heart by Kalynn Bayron, which gives you another girl whose touch is deadly, built on Greek myth with the same closed-door heat. If the fairy tale turned inside out is what you loved, Cinderella Is Dead burns down a different princess story with more anger and more romance. And Bashardoust’s own Girls Made of Snow and Glass runs the same feminist retelling engine through Snow White, at a slower pace.

For more like it, browse our bisexual sapphic books list or the full Book Reviews collection.

The Bottom Line

Girl, Serpent, Thorn wants to be a fairy tale where the princess and the monster are the same girl, and it mostly pulls that off. The Persian mythology is rich, Soraya is a heroine with real flaws and a real arc, and the sapphic ending lands with weight. It’s also a plot that shows its twists early, a side cast that never gets enough room, and a romance that has to share the stage with everything else. If you read fantasy for character and myth, it’s worth your time, and if you read for a romance-first story, borrow it before you buy it. Check Girl, Serpent, Thorn on Amazon

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, Girl, Serpent, Thorn ranks as a myth-driven YA sapphic fairy tale. It’s strong on world and heroine, held back by telegraphed twists, and best read for Soraya rather than for the romance.