Without giving too much away, I want to say that this book's villain is one of the most terrifying I've encountered: Genuinely charismatic, ruthless, the kind to slide a knife into your belly while cooing about how much she loves you and wants only the best for you. I loved that it's travel that reveals this: There's absolutely nothing like a journey for unmooring us from our certainties and assumptions, and it was mesmerizing to see Seraphina and her companions experience that unmooring as they travel to the neighboring nations of Ninysh, Samsam and Porphyry in search of more half-dragons. This dazzled me: When so much of the work of a fantasy setting is in establishing how it differs from ours, it's refreshing and exciting to see an author put real effort into showing the tension and diversity that world contains.

Shadow Scale exceeds the bounds of Seraphina in several ways: geographically it moves outward beyond the bounds of Goredd, and philosophically it delves deeper into conventional wisdom to find the ways it's anything but. Forty years of peace have left Goredd's dragon-fighting abilities depleted - but Seraphina and her fellow half-dragons may hold the key to protecting it with their unique abilities. Shadow Scale picks up where Seraphina left off, with the Queendom of Goredd coming to terms with the existence of half-dragons, a civil war among the dragons themselves after an act of betrayal, and the risk of that war spilling across their borders. Seraphina was about finding acceptance in a scornful world Shadow Scale is about self-examination, challenging your own assumptions, discovering all the ways in which you can be unbalanced and changed by new information. Shadow Scale is less a sequel than it is another stage of development it outgrows Seraphina and sheds it like a skin. It turns out that 'living up to it' is the utterly wrong frame for the question. Suppose it didn't live up to its predecessor? It was pitch-perfect, so far as I was concerned - which made me rather nervous about approaching Shadow Scale.

I fell deeply in love with it and have been pressing it into people's hands and climbing rooftops to shout about it since: half-human, half-dragon Seraphina and her wonderful voice, by turns wry and vulnerable the rich, musical world of her country Goredd and its surrounding nations the brilliantly original dragons and the tensions in their own society and philosophies. I came late to Seraphina, Rachel Hartman's first book - only discovering that gorgeous story in preparation for reviewing its sequel. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Shadow Scale Author Rachel Hartman

Seraphina book review