Seraphina

Seraphina
by
Rachel Hartman
read by
Mandy Williams

Audiobooks have two factors to decide if a story is good or not, compared to the book's one. A poorly written story with a bad or boring reader is a definite miss, while an excellent story and a good reader are a definite hit. It's the other two options that make audiobooks a bit more tricky than print books. I've found that personally, a less than spectacular story with a good reader will usually get me through the whole book, even though I know that the story is not the best, partly I think it's due to the momentum of a sound disk playing through on it's own. With a print book you either have to turn the page or press the next page button, but audiobooks require less physical interaction on the part of the reader. This sometimes works against the audiobook, if the story is good but the reader not so much. There are certain readers who's voices sound bored or boring all the time, somewhat of a drone, and this is what I mean by bad reader. I have yet to hear one who cannot read aloud well. With that said, I have experienced a number of occassions where words are mispronounced or the wrong word used, but this is really the director's fault for not correcting the reader and having them do another take. For example in one particular series, a quite long one actually, that uses two readers both of whom are excellent, one book had a series of five or six chapters where one character's name kept being exchanged for one of two others. I know this was an error since I looked up the passages, not to mention that contextually it made no sense. Also in the realm of directorial errors are having the reader announce something loudly and exuberantly and then read - "she whispered", which occurred often in a certain series of young adult books. All of this is to say that this one of those books where both the story and the reader are quite good - a sure sign of which is that you stop doing whatever else it is that you are doing while listening to the audiobook so that you can devote your full attention to the story.
Seraphina is both the name of the book and of the main character who narrates the story. She's a sixteen year old musical prodigy newly made assistant to the court composer at the royal palace in the kingdom of Goredd. The story begins two weeks before the arrival of a foreign dignitary to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the peace accord between the two peoples. Well, 'peoples' if you count dragons in humn form as people. As part of her duties to the composer Veridius, Seraphina gives harpsichord lessons to the princess Glisselda and soon becomes kind of an advisor to her and friend to her betrothed, prince Lucian who goes by the name of Kiggs. Because of her unique heritage, Seraphina's father who is a noted jurist has commanded her to never draw attention to herself, which of course means that she ends up doing it right off the bat at court and continues to throughout the book.
This book is both compicated and complex, though fortunately rarely both at the same time. The politics and the religion of the Goredd are complicated - layer upon layer, but once you are pointed to the right stitch, easy enough to unravel. The characters and their relationships are complex. This makes for a nice rich tapestry of brightly colored players.
Their are aspects of this book that remind me of the Monster Blood Tattoo trilogy by D. M. Cornish. Both use a modified European historical setting (though different time periods) and use characters from the lower classes including street urchins. Both are about the main character coming to terms with the fact that they are different from those around them and only by being honest with themselves do they ultimately gain the acceptance they so desperately crave. Hartman spends a lot less time worldbuilding than Cornish does and accomplishes a full story arc in one book, where it took Cornish three books, yet I feel that Hartman's world is very alive. More is not always better.
I also must compare this with the first two books of the Havoc Chronicle's, Threads that Bind and Unbound, by Brant Williams. Not only were these the two books I read immediately before this one, but they are also narrated by a sixteen year old girl. But, where Williams' hero seemed forced, Hartman's felt genuine and natural. It would be easy (and wrong) to dismiss this as Williams being a middle-aged man unable to truly imagine what a teen-aged must feel and think, where Hartman presumably still remembers what she felt like at that age, but Williams male characters, teen-aged or adult, felt wooden in comparison to Hartman's treatment of male, female, human or dragon characters. Hartman has her characters acting age appropriate and Williams does not - it's as simple as that. Well, and while I'm not sure if she is actually a better writer than he is, she is certainly more polished, some credit of which may go to her editor.
The only complaint I have about this book, and it's only a fake complaint, is that while the main story arc is wrapped up, enough things happen at the end that may mean a sequel or two are on the way. And while I'll happily read them when they appear, I am a little miffed that I may have been tricked into violating my self-imposted moritorium on open-ended series.

Seraphina on Powells.com
Seraphina Audiobook on Amazon.com