Musings: Seraphina

Rachel Hartman's Seraphina is exactly the sort of story that instantly appeals to me.  It features a resourceful and intelligent female lead, includes dragons as main characters, and focuses much more on political intrigue and machinations than on battles and epic journeys and the like.

The main character is Seraphina, a 16-year-old palace music instructor who has many secrets of her own, one of which is that she is half-dragon.  In the world of Goredd, her existence is believed to be impossible and immoral (which is understandable, really; inter-species breeding is generally impossible and considered pretty taboo in our world, too), so Seraphina spends most of her life hating herself, hiding from other people, and trying not to gain too much attention.

While this story is fairly typical of the coming-of-age young adult genre, it's made more interesting by the addition of all the political intrigue going on at court, and the interesting strictures that govern dragonkind and humankind.  Emotions are anathema to dragons, whereas humans think dragons are so rational that they have no souls.


On many levels, this mirrors our own struggles with science and art, or with fact and faith.  Does one side need to win the debate, or is there room for both to exist?  And does logic rule out the ability to care about other people?  How well do you need to know something to believe it to be true?  Sounds like deep philosophy, I know, but Hartman presents these issues by using vehicles such as religion, education, tradition and history in ways that are not at all dull or bogged down.  She clearly spent a lot of time creating her world and setting up the rules by which her characters must abide, and all that work pays off very well in this novel.

The writing style is also beautiful.  I did Seraphina via audiobook so have no quotes to share with you, but the narrator did a wonderful job and I was engaged the whole way through.  I took my iPod to the gym, took it on walks, listened to it on my long commutes back from work, and was completely immersed in the world.

I also loved the way Seraphina opened up in this story.  She's a strong person who doesn't shirk from what she knows is right, but the story is much more about her internal struggles to trust and form friendships with people than it is about running around the country solving crimes (though there's a fair bit of that, too!).  She doesn't have much of a sense of humor, which I missed but understood - it doesn't seem like she spends much time with people who laugh a lot.  And while I think the romantic storyline took center stage too much at the end of the book, I liked how it was incorporated into the majority of the story - as something significant, but not the most important thing ever.

I also really enjoyed the secondary characters in this book.  The Princess Glisselda is sweet and somewhat scatter-brained, but she is also very adept at politics and there's no doubt that she could run a country well.  Seraphina's uncle Orma is also a wonderful character who struggles with reconciling the way he is with the way he is supposed to be.  Seraphina's employer has hidden depths that are revealed at various points throughout the story.  And these are just a few of the many well-crafted characters.  Seraphina truly is a lovely book, and I'm excited to see where Hartman takes her story as the series continues.  Highly recommended for fans of traditional fantasy.