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anaiira 's review for:
Tess of the Road
by Rachel Hartman
Of all the novels in the luscious, resplendent world Hartman created, Tess of the Road is my favourite that I've read so far.
Explaining why I love it so much will be like carrying a river in a teacup, but I'll try.
Take all of the stuff that has been so extremely competently executed: absolutely top notch worldbuilding, consistent and coherent linguistic development (parallelling European languages but hey whatever), empathetic and compelling as heck characters, and then you have the quigutl and Tess.
The absolute audacity and charm to write a character so flawed and self-involved and tender. To have that character interact with other characters who have such clear but complex motivations, who also change (sometimes), who behave in unexpected but reasonable, and unexpected and unreasonable ways.
The nerve to have the joke about the -utl suffix, implying that everything in Qootla with that suffix is both itself and not itself, like some fantasy Hegelian dialectic; and then never mentioning that quig-utl themselves are the Hegelian ideals, containing within themselves masculine and feminine, the mortal and the divine; it's cheeky!
AND THEN, ALSO, exploring the concept of collective consciousness and the world serpent and Jungian psychology in a way that didn't make me want to immediately puke is incredible.
This book, this series, is so nerdy. But if you're just here for a swashbuckling good time with some heartwarming moments, it's also definitely that too.
Explaining why I love it so much will be like carrying a river in a teacup, but I'll try.
Take all of the stuff that has been so extremely competently executed: absolutely top notch worldbuilding, consistent and coherent linguistic development (parallelling European languages but hey whatever), empathetic and compelling as heck characters, and then you have the quigutl and Tess.
The absolute audacity and charm to write a character so flawed and self-involved and tender. To have that character interact with other characters who have such clear but complex motivations, who also change (sometimes), who behave in unexpected but reasonable, and unexpected and unreasonable ways.
The nerve to have the joke about the -utl suffix, implying that everything in Qootla with that suffix is both itself and not itself, like some fantasy Hegelian dialectic; and then never mentioning that quig-utl themselves are the Hegelian ideals, containing within themselves masculine and feminine, the mortal and the divine; it's cheeky!
AND THEN, ALSO, exploring the concept of collective consciousness and the world serpent and Jungian psychology in a way that didn't make me want to immediately puke is incredible.
This book, this series, is so nerdy. But if you're just here for a swashbuckling good time with some heartwarming moments, it's also definitely that too.