Wednesday, February 02, 2022

2022 book 18

 Rachel Hartman's In the Serpent's Wake

Normally when a new book in a series by an author I love comes out, I'd reread its predecessor, but in this case, Tess of the Road deals pretty heavily with learning to process your trauma, and I just wasn't up for it. Luckily there is a lengthy sea shanty at the beginning of this one that serves as a recap! (I don't usually read lengthy poems in books, my eyes glaze over, but it was useful here.) Anyway, this story finds Tess on a scientific expedition to find a giant dragon (and hopefully help her non-giant dragon friend), with a side mission of spying on some colonization/war efforts on the way. As usual, Hartman does the unexpected, which means is the first book I was actually interested in the whole way through in quite a while. Now, I did occasionally wish things were slightly subtler, and a lot of this boils down to privileged people learning to sit down and shut up, but at least that’s a good message. Content warning for a lot of mentions of rapists. A-.

No comments: