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4.0 AVERAGE
4.0 AVERAGE
3,5 stars.
Tess is adorable and very very human. I was in love with her character.
I am not a fan of voyage/trip books because they always feel like the characters didn’t get anywhere. Here, however, Tess gets to where she’s supposed to be, in my opinion.
However, I think the book drags in some chapters, going to much into detail when they’re not interesting. I jumped a few minutes in some chapters and that’s why the 3,5.
This book is about a human girl that, yes, meets mythical creatures, but at the end of day is a book about that girl that is just trying to find herself.
Tess is adorable and very very human. I was in love with her character.
I am not a fan of voyage/trip books because they always feel like the characters didn’t get anywhere. Here, however, Tess gets to where she’s supposed to be, in my opinion.
However, I think the book drags in some chapters, going to much into detail when they’re not interesting. I jumped a few minutes in some chapters and that’s why the 3,5.
This book is about a human girl that, yes, meets mythical creatures, but at the end of day is a book about that girl that is just trying to find herself.
I don’t know why, but I could not get into this book. Good recs from people I trust, but every time I went to read it, I’d zone out and completely forget what was happening. That’s my sign to move on.
DNF @ 58%
I received an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.
This book started off strong for me. Tess is a trouble-maker as a child. I love her curiosity and scheming. She was a well-thought out character. When she gets older; however, I found her to be indecisive and I got bored of her. I found myself not as attached to her as I was, and she was frustrating as a main character.
I loved the writing. It's descriptive, but this book is definitely a slow burn. It was unfortunately too slow-paced for me to keep reading. The themes that are discussed are different: religion, soon, and self-discovery done in a unique way. I recommend this book to someone looking for a book to get invested in, and that has more patience than me.
I received an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.
This book started off strong for me. Tess is a trouble-maker as a child. I love her curiosity and scheming. She was a well-thought out character. When she gets older; however, I found her to be indecisive and I got bored of her. I found myself not as attached to her as I was, and she was frustrating as a main character.
I loved the writing. It's descriptive, but this book is definitely a slow burn. It was unfortunately too slow-paced for me to keep reading. The themes that are discussed are different: religion, soon, and self-discovery done in a unique way. I recommend this book to someone looking for a book to get invested in, and that has more patience than me.
After years performing penance for her fall from grace, Tess reaches her breaking point and runs away from home. This is a book about journey, self-discovery, and trauma recovery, and I kept waiting for it to make a decline into preachy or hamfisted (especially as I read it just after Foz Meadow's Manifold World series, which is thematically similar and constantly caught out by its tone). But it never does. It's not a flawless book: the end is neat, too many supporting characters undergo positive development (everyone is too nice), and the thesis statements are aggressively made clear. But it's nuanced, organic, dynamic, contradicting, and so much greater than those flaws. There's a balance between the grounded, concrete, gradual work of life and of recovery and the sweeping emotional appeal of epiphanies, ineffabilities, and faith, and this balance--the stunning realizations; the practical work of actualizing them--particularly combined with the vibrant world and voice, builds a narrative which refuses sanctimony and simplification while still being ridiculously affecting. TL;DR: I cried a lot but did not cringe, and that's not easy for this sort of story to achieve.
I thought Seraphina was fine when I read it, but don't remember much of it now. I'm wasn't compelled to read the sequel, and rarely read YA at all these days. So I wouldn't have come to Tess of the Road if I hadn't been told that it stands alone and is a book of a different type, but it is. Being familiar with the sibling works is helpful but not necessary, and this is more complex and tonally modulated than I find in most YA.
I thought Seraphina was fine when I read it, but don't remember much of it now. I'm wasn't compelled to read the sequel, and rarely read YA at all these days. So I wouldn't have come to Tess of the Road if I hadn't been told that it stands alone and is a book of a different type, but it is. Being familiar with the sibling works is helpful but not necessary, and this is more complex and tonally modulated than I find in most YA.
This took me a very, very long time to get into and I nearly stopped reading at about the 30% mark. Actually, I did stop reading and then go on to read other more exciting things, and then I ran out of books in my luggage except for one I didn't really want to read, so I went back to this one and then I finished it off and it wasn't so bad.
...I think it was just a matter of the wrong book at the wrong time. It deals with weighty, important matters, like how your past shouldn't define your future, and rape and coercion, and the fact that we are always forgiving of dashing young pirates, if they are male, but not confused young maidens who are no longer virgins.
This makes it a very hard, but impactful, book to read--and maybe even a little troublesome, especially if you're one to always defend the Church and its preachers. Well, it's obvious it isn't the Church, but it is, isn't it?
...I think it was just a matter of the wrong book at the wrong time. It deals with weighty, important matters, like how your past shouldn't define your future, and rape and coercion, and the fact that we are always forgiving of dashing young pirates, if they are male, but not confused young maidens who are no longer virgins.
This makes it a very hard, but impactful, book to read--and maybe even a little troublesome, especially if you're one to always defend the Church and its preachers. Well, it's obvious it isn't the Church, but it is, isn't it?
This book was not really what I expected at all. Firstly, there weren't any dragons, despite there being a dragon on the front cover. Secondly, it wasn't really about an adventure at all. I think if I had actually known what this book was about before reading it, I would have enjoyed it more, but I was just disappointed. :/
SPOILER AHEAD SPOILER AHEAD (idk how to do the hide spoilers thing)
My favorite part was when she was part of the road work team and they were all just pals and bros. I don't know why, but I really enjoyed the friendship they had.
The love story part at the end just felt forced and dumb to me though.
SPOILER AHEAD SPOILER AHEAD (idk how to do the hide spoilers thing)
My favorite part was when she was part of the road work team and they were all just pals and bros. I don't know why, but I really enjoyed the friendship they had.
The love story part at the end just felt forced and dumb to me though.
*sigh*
I have a complicated relationship with Rachel Hartman. Y'all know I *adored* Seraphina. And y'all also know how frustrated and disappointed I was with Shadow Scale.
So when I saw she had a new book, I was cautiously optimistic. Maybe Shadow Scale was an anomaly, and Tess of the Road would be just as good as Seraphina.
Well...it's not. But it's not Shadow Scale either. It's it's own...beast of a book.
To clarify: TotR is set in the same world as Seraphina and Shadow Scale. After all, Tess is Seraphina's half-sister, and Seraphina has a clear presence in this story. However, there are very few dragons in this book and there is very little magic. It's much more of a moral, emotional, awakening novel -- and I struggled with it in the beginning. A lot.
Much like Seraphina, it takes *a while* to get into. Where Seraphina took me about 100 pages to get into, I think the switch flipped for me around page 250 here. Which, if you don't like a book, is a long time to commit to it in the hopes that it will get better. I honestly don't know why I kept reading.
I am glad I did though. I'll clarify why in a second, but before I do, I want to mention something. After I finished reading the book, I took to Google to find if it's the first in a series. [Answer: Yes -- there's a sequel coming. Apparently Hartman prefers two-books-series, so Tess will have a companion novel.) But in my search, I stumbled upon a glowing review from NPR. While I didn't love the entire review -- El-Mohtar calls it "astonishing and perfect," which I would emphatically disagree with -- she claims it is the "most compassionate book [she's] read since George Eliot's Middlemarch." That comment literally made me pause, and think, "Huh. That would explain a lot." Viewing Hartman as writing in the tradition of Eliot (with, I think, a dash of Chopin's The Awakening), and viewing her novels in the tradition of the Victorian novel, makes a lot of sense to me: the multiple-plots have been streamlined, so we only focus on Tess rather than bouncing back and forth between, say, Dorothea and Rosamond but the focus on the mental struggle is still there. (Maybe Adam Bede is a good reference point.)
Alright. Let's break it down.
To start: Tess, Seraphina's half-sister, is our protagonist. We meet her at a pretty rough point in her life -- something we don't fully understand until about 3/4 of the way through the book because the backstory is unfolded through flashback chapters. Spoiler-laden cliff notes version? Tess was a student in a college-town, snuck out of her rather Puritanical household to attend lectures, met a charming frat boy who whispered sweet nothings in her ear and then knocked her up and disappeared. Tess has the baby -- to the eternal shame of her mother, since Tess, as the oldest sister, the Angelica Schuyler of the family, has to marry well to raise the family up -- at an aging female relative's house. But because her uncle is a twisted SOB and a mean drunk to boot, he kills the aunt/grandmother (I can't remember which) and the shock of discovering her dead body sends Tess into premature labor and the baby is born about 3 months early. (This part is actually very poignantly written, but writing it out, I realize how melodramatic it is.) Tess returns home, and her younger twin sister is placed at court and Tess helps her make the advantageous marriage that brings the family $$$ (but not happiness to her sister). After Tess gets drunk, her parents arrange for her to enter a convent and Seraphina helps her run away -- thus starts the interminably long part of the book, Tess, on the road.
Also, there's a not-dragon on a religious/spiritual awakening quest thing.
And a world-serpent.
The part I struggled with -- even though I could hate it and understand what Hartman was going for at the same time -- was the Puritanical portrayal of Tess's family and the effect it had on Tess's self-perception of herself.
Yes--I got what Hartman was going for. The whole journey of self-re-discovery and learning who she was outside of her parents and family's dictates -- I got it.
BUT.
While the specifics aren't made clear until much -- MUCH -- later in the book, what is clear is that Tess had sex outside of marriage, and she is, basically, slut-shamed for it. BY HER FAMILY.
And, yes, I know this happens IRL. I know that this is not a fictional liberty.
But there is SO MUCH OF IT.
So much so, that I quit reading the book for a few weeks because I couldn't take it. It was painful -- not necessarily from her family, because insufferable family members are a staple in books; it was the way Tess viewed herself that was like nails on a chalkboard to me.
So, Tess walks away. (I mean, she runs away, but her thing is literally walking.) And she has adventures and learns things about herself and then there's the whole thing about the quigutl which was the closest thing to a Rosamond-level-George-Eliot-subplot we have. I liked it, thought it random, and missed the dragons. I'm sure it will come into play in the sequel.
What ultimately saved the book for me, not surprisingly, was when Tess started to realize her value as a person. (It just took FOREVER.) About page 275, we meet Mother Philomela who, ironically, is the Sister who Tess was supposed to go with to basically "get thee to a nunnery."
There's one exchange in particular that sold me -- that hooked me back in to the rest of the story:
"The body sound liked a corpse at a funeral. 'The body, as in...the wellspring of sin? The author of excess and misery? That body?' Tess said, trying to plumb the nun's meaning.
'Don't quote me St. Vitt,' snapped Philomela, her face like a bulldog's. 'That is *not* what I mean. We don't subscribe to his contempuous credos here.'
'The flesh is but a sack of goo?' Tess sang badly, batting her eyes.
[...]
'I would guess, based on your knee-jerk quotations, that you were raised to despise the flesh and all its fleshly doings. So tell me, young gentleman,' said Philomela, putting a light emphasis, not quite sarcastic, on 'gentleman,' 'in your philosophical estimation -- or in St. Vitt's -- is the body born evil, or does it do evil for the sheer anarchic joy of it?'
[...]
'Born evil,' said Tess, heart pounding. 'St Vitt says explicitly that the female--'
'Wrong,' snapped the old nun, her sharp green eyes taking in every nuance of Tess's reaction. 'First, I gave you two choices as a test: there are never just two choices. That is a lie to keep you from thinking too deeply. Second, and more important: the body is innocent. Deeply, beautifully, fundamentally innocent. [...] Third...consider children, who merely follow their natures. They may be born difficult or contrary but never evil. The ones who enjoy misbehaving can be taught better. Too many, alas, have parents who hold them in contempt. So it is with the body. The hated innocent becomes hateful. Goodness withers when it is continuously ground underfoot. We fulfill our parents' direst prophecies, then curl around our own pain until we can't see beyond ourselves. You want to walk on? Walk out of that shadow. Walk, girl.'"
YAS. THAT WAS WHAT I WAS WAITING FOR. But 54% of the way through the book is just a bit too late in the game for me.
Luckily though, Philomela isn't the only strong female character (LIKE MY SERAPHINA FROM BOOK ONE). We also meet Boss Gen, a woman in charge of an itinerant road crew, and Darling Dulsia, a traveling prostitute, yes, but is portrayed as a woman in charge of her livelihood AND her sexuality.
THIS is what I wanted. THIS is what I loved about Seraphina and missed in the sequel and the first half of this book.
I understand a little bit of it was necessary -- and I don't even begrudge the with-holding of the full story -- but it was way too much for me. The second half of the book was much more engaging and satisfying to read, but I am wary of the sequel.
There are lots of threads left -- for instance, I very much wanted Tess to encounter/confront/smack-down Will -- and I don't doubt that Tess's journey will continue in the vein of liberation and empowerment. Perhaps the companion book will be all the better because we've dispensed with Tess's self-vilifying. (But I imagine she'll have to face her family again so who knows.)
I have a complicated relationship with Rachel Hartman. Y'all know I *adored* Seraphina. And y'all also know how frustrated and disappointed I was with Shadow Scale.
So when I saw she had a new book, I was cautiously optimistic. Maybe Shadow Scale was an anomaly, and Tess of the Road would be just as good as Seraphina.
Well...it's not. But it's not Shadow Scale either. It's it's own...beast of a book.
To clarify: TotR is set in the same world as Seraphina and Shadow Scale. After all, Tess is Seraphina's half-sister, and Seraphina has a clear presence in this story. However, there are very few dragons in this book and there is very little magic. It's much more of a moral, emotional, awakening novel -- and I struggled with it in the beginning. A lot.
Much like Seraphina, it takes *a while* to get into. Where Seraphina took me about 100 pages to get into, I think the switch flipped for me around page 250 here. Which, if you don't like a book, is a long time to commit to it in the hopes that it will get better. I honestly don't know why I kept reading.
I am glad I did though. I'll clarify why in a second, but before I do, I want to mention something. After I finished reading the book, I took to Google to find if it's the first in a series. [Answer: Yes -- there's a sequel coming. Apparently Hartman prefers two-books-series, so Tess will have a companion novel.) But in my search, I stumbled upon a glowing review from NPR. While I didn't love the entire review -- El-Mohtar calls it "astonishing and perfect," which I would emphatically disagree with -- she claims it is the "most compassionate book [she's] read since George Eliot's Middlemarch." That comment literally made me pause, and think, "Huh. That would explain a lot." Viewing Hartman as writing in the tradition of Eliot (with, I think, a dash of Chopin's The Awakening), and viewing her novels in the tradition of the Victorian novel, makes a lot of sense to me: the multiple-plots have been streamlined, so we only focus on Tess rather than bouncing back and forth between, say, Dorothea and Rosamond but the focus on the mental struggle is still there. (Maybe Adam Bede is a good reference point.)
Alright. Let's break it down.
To start: Tess, Seraphina's half-sister, is our protagonist. We meet her at a pretty rough point in her life -- something we don't fully understand until about 3/4 of the way through the book because the backstory is unfolded through flashback chapters. Spoiler-laden cliff notes version? Tess was a student in a college-town, snuck out of her rather Puritanical household to attend lectures, met a charming frat boy who whispered sweet nothings in her ear and then knocked her up and disappeared. Tess has the baby -- to the eternal shame of her mother, since Tess, as the oldest sister, the Angelica Schuyler of the family, has to marry well to raise the family up -- at an aging female relative's house. But because her uncle is a twisted SOB and a mean drunk to boot, he kills the aunt/grandmother (I can't remember which) and the shock of discovering her dead body sends Tess into premature labor and the baby is born about 3 months early. (This part is actually very poignantly written, but writing it out, I realize how melodramatic it is.) Tess returns home, and her younger twin sister is placed at court and Tess helps her make the advantageous marriage that brings the family $$$ (but not happiness to her sister). After Tess gets drunk, her parents arrange for her to enter a convent and Seraphina helps her run away -- thus starts the interminably long part of the book, Tess, on the road.
Also, there's a not-dragon on a religious/spiritual awakening quest thing.
And a world-serpent.
The part I struggled with -- even though I could hate it and understand what Hartman was going for at the same time -- was the Puritanical portrayal of Tess's family and the effect it had on Tess's self-perception of herself.
Yes--I got what Hartman was going for. The whole journey of self-re-discovery and learning who she was outside of her parents and family's dictates -- I got it.
BUT.
While the specifics aren't made clear until much -- MUCH -- later in the book, what is clear is that Tess had sex outside of marriage, and she is, basically, slut-shamed for it. BY HER FAMILY.
And, yes, I know this happens IRL. I know that this is not a fictional liberty.
But there is SO MUCH OF IT.
So much so, that I quit reading the book for a few weeks because I couldn't take it. It was painful -- not necessarily from her family, because insufferable family members are a staple in books; it was the way Tess viewed herself that was like nails on a chalkboard to me.
So, Tess walks away. (I mean, she runs away, but her thing is literally walking.) And she has adventures and learns things about herself and then there's the whole thing about the quigutl which was the closest thing to a Rosamond-level-George-Eliot-subplot we have. I liked it, thought it random, and missed the dragons. I'm sure it will come into play in the sequel.
What ultimately saved the book for me, not surprisingly, was when Tess started to realize her value as a person. (It just took FOREVER.) About page 275, we meet Mother Philomela who, ironically, is the Sister who Tess was supposed to go with to basically "get thee to a nunnery."
There's one exchange in particular that sold me -- that hooked me back in to the rest of the story:
"The body sound liked a corpse at a funeral. 'The body, as in...the wellspring of sin? The author of excess and misery? That body?' Tess said, trying to plumb the nun's meaning.
'Don't quote me St. Vitt,' snapped Philomela, her face like a bulldog's. 'That is *not* what I mean. We don't subscribe to his contempuous credos here.'
'The flesh is but a sack of goo?' Tess sang badly, batting her eyes.
[...]
'I would guess, based on your knee-jerk quotations, that you were raised to despise the flesh and all its fleshly doings. So tell me, young gentleman,' said Philomela, putting a light emphasis, not quite sarcastic, on 'gentleman,' 'in your philosophical estimation -- or in St. Vitt's -- is the body born evil, or does it do evil for the sheer anarchic joy of it?'
[...]
'Born evil,' said Tess, heart pounding. 'St Vitt says explicitly that the female--'
'Wrong,' snapped the old nun, her sharp green eyes taking in every nuance of Tess's reaction. 'First, I gave you two choices as a test: there are never just two choices. That is a lie to keep you from thinking too deeply. Second, and more important: the body is innocent. Deeply, beautifully, fundamentally innocent. [...] Third...consider children, who merely follow their natures. They may be born difficult or contrary but never evil. The ones who enjoy misbehaving can be taught better. Too many, alas, have parents who hold them in contempt. So it is with the body. The hated innocent becomes hateful. Goodness withers when it is continuously ground underfoot. We fulfill our parents' direst prophecies, then curl around our own pain until we can't see beyond ourselves. You want to walk on? Walk out of that shadow. Walk, girl.'"
YAS. THAT WAS WHAT I WAS WAITING FOR. But 54% of the way through the book is just a bit too late in the game for me.
Luckily though, Philomela isn't the only strong female character (LIKE MY SERAPHINA FROM BOOK ONE). We also meet Boss Gen, a woman in charge of an itinerant road crew, and Darling Dulsia, a traveling prostitute, yes, but is portrayed as a woman in charge of her livelihood AND her sexuality.
THIS is what I wanted. THIS is what I loved about Seraphina and missed in the sequel and the first half of this book.
I understand a little bit of it was necessary -- and I don't even begrudge the with-holding of the full story -- but it was way too much for me. The second half of the book was much more engaging and satisfying to read, but I am wary of the sequel.
There are lots of threads left -- for instance, I very much wanted Tess to encounter/confront/smack-down Will -- and I don't doubt that Tess's journey will continue in the vein of liberation and empowerment. Perhaps the companion book will be all the better because we've dispensed with Tess's self-vilifying. (But I imagine she'll have to face her family again so who knows.)
this book was very slow going in the beginning for me & when my hold was up i nearly returned it without finishing. but i held out & finishing listening to the audiobook & surprising really liked the second half, im not sure i want to read the next book though so we’ll see.
Df. I like character driven stories, I just wasn’t into this one. Got maybe 20% through. I got the sense of where it was going and didn’t feel compelled to read it through. And I’m never a big fan of religious trauma storylines (ie losing your virginity so now the woman is ostracized)
What a complete delight, beginning to end. Hartman's fascinating fantasy-Renaissance world of dragons and saints is still here, richly detailed and varied, but the narrative is laser-focused on the personal journey of Seraphina's half-sister Tess, as fierce as Seraphina but intuitive, conflicted, and fully human. Even at her worst, Tess is brilliant company, and watching her learn to substitute empathy for anger, healing herself by tiny, agonizing increments, is only one of the deep satisfactions of this book. Hartman confidently navigates myth, religion, science, and psychology, turning the cliched hero's journey into a much more realistic -- and far more entertaining -- heroine's journey. You don't have to read Hartman's first two novels, [b:Seraphina|19549841|Seraphina (Seraphina, #1)|Rachel Hartman|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1387577872s/19549841.jpg|17375239] and [b:Shadow Scale|16085457|Shadow Scale (Seraphina, #2)|Rachel Hartman|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1405355942s/16085457.jpg|21451371], to follow this one, but your understanding of Tess' journey and her adventures to come will be much more fun if you do.