Review: Seraphina by Rachel Hartman

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Review: Seraphina by Rachel Hartman

Rating: ★★★★1/2

 

Four decades of peace have done little to ease the mistrust between humans and dragons in the kingdom of Goredd. Folding themselves into human shape, dragons attend court as ambassadors, and lend their rational, mathematical minds to universities as scholars and teachers. As the treaty's anniversary draws near, however, tensions are high.

Seraphina Dombegh has reason to fear both sides. An unusually gifted musician, she joins the court just as a member of the royal family is murdered—in suspiciously draconian fashion. Seraphina is drawn into the investigation, partnering with the captain of the Queen's Guard, the dangerously perceptive Prince Lucian Kiggs. While they begin to uncover hints of a sinister plot to destroy the peace, Seraphina struggles to protect her own secret, the secret behind her musical gift, one so terrible that its discovery could mean her very life.

This book is ten different kinds of awesome. This is the deepest, most layered fantasy I have read in a while. The world created here hardly feels fictional. Every corner has been filled out, every detail comes alive. I felt less like I was reading about Goreddi than I was actually walking around it with Seraphina as my guide. I now know which saints to invoke when you’re in mourning, which to invoke if you’re shocked (St. Daan in a pan!), which carry their heads on a platter, and which are heretics. It’s a world deeply entrenched in religion, prejudice, fear, tradition, and music.

Seraphina is a fantastic narrator. She’s brilliant, casually dropping words like calefactive like it’s no big deal. She’s musically gifted, very observant, and intensely lonely. But she has a reason to be lonely. Her head is filled with numbers, music, and… a mind-garden full of grotesques. Yes, you read that right. It was so original. Confusing at first, but once I got a hold on it… holy smokes. I loved the grotesques she must tend to every night before she goes to sleep. Loud Lad and Fruit Bats and the sublimely creepy Jannoula.

Until yesterday, I thought there was an overabundance of dragons in contemporary fantasy. But Hartman’s dragons are so unique that I just want more of them. In their true forms, Hartman’s dragons are just as you’d imagine- big, scaly, winged fire breathers. But in order to facilitate peace between them and the humans, they’ve learned to take the forms of people. What they haven’t learned is how to act like them.

Dragons are ruled by order. Emotions are dirty, nasty things that sully one’s logic. This is both very frustrating for humans and very amusing for me. I ADORE the dragons. They are like Vulcans but even more socially awkward. I found myself giggling at their inability to perceive sarcasm and their complete indifference to people’s feelings.

The human characters are just as vivid. Prince Lucian Skiggs made a worthy intellectual companion. Princess Glisselda, golden-haired second heir and Lucian’s fiancée, deftly avoids being a cliché by possessing heart and a steely determination.

Seraphina’s battle between her head and her heart, between her different halves, between her need to be ignored and her thirst to be loved, are the center of this book. She is uniquely disposed to ameliorate the deteriorating situation between the dragons and the humans. She’s sharp-eyed and unruffled one moment, full of emotion the next. Seraphina was a very real character.

The plot is dense with world-building, but still so enjoyable. So much happens. The ending is appropriately climactic, the cliff-hanger not so hang-y, which I always appreciate. Devastating things happen, but happy things, too. And the LANGUAGE. This is one gorgeously written book. I found  myself squirreling away a lot of Hartman’s descriptors because they were just so wonderful.

I would recommend this book to everyone and anyone. Even if you don’t like fantasy, give it a try. And if you do, it is a MUST READ.