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4.0 AVERAGE
4.0 AVERAGE
The first time I read it, I stopped and wept at many intervals, and madly journaled my thoughts.
I’ve since read it twice more, with a notepad beside me each time.
The depth of Tess’s introspection and character growth is not pretentious or melodramatic, but rather honest and blunt and poignant.
Having come from a similar religious community to the one Tess is raised in, I was deeply impacted by her unlearning process and healing journey.
This book has been my model as I have deconstructed and dissected my worldview.
It both comforted me with familiar pain and altered my perspective with new opinions.
This is a profound story of escape and healing and rebirth, not a gritty dragon adventure, but I learned so much that I wasn’t even disappointed.
I’m sure I will continue to peruse it once a year or so, catching new angles and unearthing nuance as I go.
People who love Seraphina come to Tess of the Road sulky and resentful. Seraphina is the indisputable hero of this world, and that Tess's book jacket claims you'll love Tess just as much is a put-off, I'll admit. When I picked up Tess and read its claim I snorted before flipping to the first page and thinking, All right, show me what you got.
And like Tess herself, I was shown.
The story of Tess is not so epic and world-changing as Seraphina's - but somehow it also is. It is and it is not, both, at the same time, which is something that we don't really have a way to express in our human language but that the Quigutl language, Quootla, does.
Quootla had a suffix, -utl, that could be glued to the end of anything–nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns, small rodents–and meant the word itself plus its opposite, simultaneously...Time/no time almost made sense; blue/orange or fall/rise or dog/whatever-the-opposite-of-dog-is were perfectly intelligible in Quootla but boggling to nearly everyone else.
After a brief prologue that shows us how Tess's insatiable curiosity makes her a "spank magnet," as well as foreshadows the serious trouble that will, years later, "ruin" Tess, we skip ahead to the young 17-year-old woman she's become: drunk, broken, apathetic at her best and resentful and acerbic at her worst.
And she has every right to be.
Trauma from Tess's past has plunged her into a hole, and when we catch up with her, it's becoming increasingly apparent to Tess that death is the only way out–something that she learns is entirely untrue later on. ("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.)
After a particularly horrific social display that involves Tess punching her priest-in-training brother-in-law behind a screen where she was supposed to be watching her sister consummate her new marriage to confirm her virginity, St. Seraphina steps down from on high to intervene. She gives Tess a new pair of boots and some advice: go. Escape, let yourself loose from the crushing judgment of your family and society.
And she does.
After meeting Pathka, an old Quigutl friend, she remembers her old childhood dream of discovering Anathuthia, one of the 7 World Serpents who shaped the earth. Like Tess, Pathka also needs to heal and is convinced that finding the World Serpent is the only way. What follows is not a direct road to Anathuthia–which might've made for a shorter read–but a long, meandering journey.
Finding Anathuthia is Pathka's quest, and Tess joins ko (the Quootla gender-neutral pronoun) but her true goal is just to keep walking. Tess wants nothing but the open, empty, ongoing road. She calls herself a child of the road, always moving forward. She does have adventures, but, most importantly for Tess, she encounters a range of creatures (mostly human) that bond with her. They help ease her out of her tight coil of bitterness, allowing her to confront her trauma in a way she never could in her mother's pious, neglectful household.
'Oh ignoramus,' it said, 'your life is not a tragedy. It's history, and it's yours.
The movement of Tess's story is less grand than Seraphina's because so much of it is happening under the surface. It's a slow novel because–just like the World Serpent itself slowly making and unmaking the world–Tess's quest doesn't have a clear goal or destination, other than Tess learning to heal herself. And when does that really end for any of us?
I wholeheartedly loved this story, more so even than Seraphina, and I love knowing that somewhere, out there, Tess is beyond it all, eyes on the horizon, boots on, and a plumed hat sitting rakishly on her head.
It is a journey book, and Tess’ journey left me feeling more compassionate about my own journey and the hatred and failings I’ve flung in my face as I strove to alk on. What book does that? Absolves you of your own misdeeds as you follow along with the heroine? What a joy.
I hope book 2 arrives soon.
My only con session is that you should read the Seraphina books first, or read them in tandem as I am, to get context on dragons and quigatls, and the more general world building that was done.