A Snake Among Swans (The Wing and the Ways, #1) by Hannah Kaner Published by Harper Voyager on September 8, 2026
Genres: Fantasy & Magic, LGBTQ
Pages: 464
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Source: NetGalley
A dark and propulsive new epic fantasy from the #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of the Fallen Gods trilogy. An intricate tale of warring kingdoms, female rage and a wild magic that refuses to be tamed.
“Death is come to take you home, death of blood and thorn and bone…”
Tilde has always heard the whispers of the kithwood, the voices of her ancestors speaking through the mysterious forest of her homeland.
But now both the kithwood and her kingdom are in danger.
For Tilde is the only surviving heir of a conquered land. To unite the people and finally stop the bloodshed, she marries the aging warlord, King Liran. Her duty is to bind their nations and bear him a son.
But the swan king’s court is dangerous. Tilde is a threat to the claim of Liran’s older sons, who will do whatever it takes to remove her, to the princess Elise who has only ever known loyalty to her family, and to the priests who own them all.
Yet none of them know that Tilde is a snake in their midst, with allies on her side and dark, forbidden power of her own. She wants her kingdom back, and she will sacrifice everything to claim it.
For the queen to rise, the swans must fall.
A Snake Among Swans is a tough novel for me to rate. With Godkiller, also written by Hannah Kaner, being one of my favorite fantasy novels ever, my expectations were high for a new world and cast of characters from the same author. Like Godkiller, A Snake Among Swans has a complex cast of characters with differing motives, an interesting enough magic system, and a high stakes political setting.
Despite all of this, I couldn’t shake the feeling that nothing ever happened in A Snake Among Swans. Even when more climactic moments were happening, I felt like they never really led anywhere until the very end of the novel. And then, the book was over. Despite it ending rather abruptly, I wouldn’t feel the need to read a sequel.
“Do not cut off the swan’s head and call it vengeance while its poison seeps out. Pluck out its feathers, silence its beak, destroy its nest and set a snake on its young.”
I really wanted to like the main characters as well, but found it difficult to root for either of them. One is Tilde, rebel heir to a fallen kingdom seeking to take down the empire; the other is Elise, a sheltered princess born into the ruling family that has subjugated Tilde’s people. While I loved the sapphic relationships in Faithbreaker and The Priory of the Orange Tree, which featured similar relationship roles, I didn’t really find the attraction between these two characters convincing or particularly compelling. Perhaps it’s because I didn’t really care for either character.
Tilde is introduced to us as a brave woman who seeks to assassinate the king of the swan empire after marrying him. She quickly realizes that her assassination plans aren’t going to work, so aims to ingratiate herself among the court. To put it plainly, she’s not very good at it. Though she’s presented as a snake waiting in the tall grass to strike among the swans, carefully scheming and biding her time, she reacts to events more than she manipulates much of anything.
It is not until the end of the book that her actions really make a difference. I wanted to be invested in her fight to bring down the empire, but the family behind the crown is so awful and dysfunctional that it felt less like a story of Tilde’s vengeance and more like their loss of power was inevitable. I think I was expecting a protagonist similar to Sylvia from The Jasad Heir, but Tilde doesn’t seem to have the same fire, agency, or abilities as that protagonist.
Elise also tends to be a reactor rather than a major player. Growing up in an abusive family, the poor woman is merely trying to survive, stay out of the way, and go unnoticed. Like Tilde, she has a tragic backstory as well. Her passivity makes sense given the abusive environment in which she was raised, but understanding why she behaves this way didn’t necessarily make her more compelling to follow.
Both Tilde and Elise feel more like familiar archetypes, the rebel heir of a colonized nation and the sheltered princess, than characters who ever fully develop beyond those roles. They could be foils for one another, as they both are daughters to a crown, but it never really gets much past the surface level. The attraction occurs before there is much chance to explore their similarities and differences. There was so much potential material here for guilt, understanding, resentment, and conflict, but the relationship largely settles for their inconvenient attraction to one another. I would have liked the novel to spend more time exploring the differences in their upbringings and beliefs before delving into a romance. Instead, the characters largely tiptoe around heavy topics such as the public torture and murder of siblings, colonization, and the oppression of culture and religion.
I cannot really say there was a single character I outright liked in this book. That would be fine if I found any of the cast compelling, but I just didn’t. With both protagonists spending so much of the novel reacting to the people around them, perhaps it’s unsurprising that the plot itself often felt similarly stagnant.
“Keep to the paths, and do not stray. Listen to the trees, but do not obey.”
Much like the characters, I also felt the magic system never developed far beyond its familiar foundations. Magic forests are a pretty big staple of the genre, and while there was nothing super new here, I was disappointed that the forest felt more like a convenient plot device rather than an actual fully-fledged magical system. I needed this particular forest to feel more specific and integral to the world. Instead, the magic existed primarily when the plot needed it.
I think Godkiller had me primed to expect another fantasy story with familiar elements that would nevertheless leave me completely invested in its world and characters. And A Snake Among Swans did give me many of the ingredients I normally enjoy, including political fantasy, morally complicated characters, sapphic romance, rebellion, and magic, but somehow the heart of the story felt missing. Ultimately, A Snake Among Swans certainly isn’t a bad read, but it’s not one that left me looking for more.
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Thanks for sharing. This is more Robin’s lane on our blog.
Anne – Books of My Heart
Thank you for reading 💙😊