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A review by justabookishreader
Seraphina by Rachel Hartman
5.0
Ahhhhhh wowie my family has good taste! This book featured in a pile of books gifted to my mom from her mom. The rest of the books were: The Queen of the Tearling, The Bone Season, and Wildwood. I've read The Queen of the Tearling (also gave it 5 stars, go check out my review if you'd like!), and my mom gave me her copy of The Bone Season to keep since she had it on her kindle and adored it. She even told me to read The Priory of the Orange Tree (which is fitting as I am her lesbian daughter lol) and I definitely plan to - it's on my kindle and I'm saving it for our summer road trip in July. Let's just say, I'm definitely going to be reading The Bone Season ASAP, and then borrowing Wildwood from my mom (hopefully) as well.
The timing of my reading of this book was just about perfect. I had picked up a different book, it had been a Christmas gift from my mom, and it had been rumored to have amazing Jewish and Autistic-coded representation. Well in that book they introduced that character as being an arsonist, loving numbers, etc. Well, going into this one - all I knew was "hey dragons love and turn into humans." I was overjoyed when I discovered that more likely than not (as an autistic woman recognizing particular descriptions that is), the entire race of dragons was based on autistic people. It made me feel seen and so fucking emotional. All the moments with Linn's memories and her talking about how emotions are so complex and metaphors are so abstract but they're the only way to explain her feelings, with Omra being introduced as loving difficult mathematics and hating itchy fabrics, the subtle social cues that Omra misses which are amusing as someone who uhhhh definitely relates... I need more books like these. It's so beautiful too, the prose, the description, the story in general.
While this wasn't one of those books that made me "rethink my rating system" it was one that I connected to so much that it would be a crime not to add it to the favorites shelf. I can't wait to get my hands on the next book.
The timing of my reading of this book was just about perfect. I had picked up a different book, it had been a Christmas gift from my mom, and it had been rumored to have amazing Jewish and Autistic-coded representation. Well in that book they introduced that character as being an arsonist, loving numbers, etc. Well, going into this one - all I knew was "hey dragons love and turn into humans." I was overjoyed when I discovered that more likely than not (as an autistic woman recognizing particular descriptions that is), the entire race of dragons was based on autistic people. It made me feel seen and so fucking emotional. All the moments with Linn's memories and her talking about how emotions are so complex and metaphors are so abstract but they're the only way to explain her feelings, with Omra being introduced as loving difficult mathematics and hating itchy fabrics, the subtle social cues that Omra misses which are amusing as someone who uhhhh definitely relates... I need more books like these. It's so beautiful too, the prose, the description, the story in general.
While this wasn't one of those books that made me "rethink my rating system" it was one that I connected to so much that it would be a crime not to add it to the favorites shelf. I can't wait to get my hands on the next book.