Review:
Shadow Scale, by Rachel Hartman
| Series: |
Seraphina #2 |
| Publisher: |
Ember |
| Copyright: |
2015 |
| ISBN: |
0-375-89659-7 |
| Format: |
Kindle |
| Pages: |
458 |
Shadow Scale, despite confusing publisher marketing that calls it a
"companion" to
Seraphina, is a direct
sequel. It picks up shortly after
Seraphina and resolves most of
the loose ends of the previous book.
This is a book for which my completionist tendencies did me no favors.
The book I was intending to read, when I started on Hartman's work, is
Tess of the Road, but I hate starting series in the middle and it
was clear that
Tess was set after
Seraphina. (I have been
repeatedly assured that this doesn't matter and that one can start with
Tess. Such reassurances rarely work on me; do as I say, not as I
do.) For
Seraphina itself, this turned out fine; I'm mildly
surprised by the book's Andre Norton award nomination, but it was
enjoyable enough and I liked the first-person protagonist.
Shadow Scale I approached with a bit more trepidation. I hadn't
heard much about it and the few reviews I saw were lukewarm.
Unfortunately, there's a reason for that.
Seraphina left obvious room for a sequel, including a brewing war,
significant unresolved interpersonal relationships, and Seraphina's own
newfound understanding of the nature of her internal menagerie. Alas, the
start of the book uses the war primarily as plot device (and introduces a
brand-new bit of magic that I never found interesting), largely ignores
the relationship, and focuses on that third plot element. And by focuses,
I mean Seraphina is sent out of the country of Goredd on a journey of map
exploration to collect plot coupons.
The best description I have for the middle of this book is tedious and
depressing. Like a lot of novels, it has a U-shaped plot: things get
worse and worse until a crisis, and then start getting better. This plot
can work, but the reader has to have a good reason to stick through the
depressing bits. One of the better reasons is if the plot allows the main
character some small triumphs, maintaining their agency throughout even if
larger events are spiraling out of control. This is not one of those
books. After some early successes tracking down some objects of her
search, Seraphina encounters an antagonist from her own past (barely
hinted at in the first book) who can systematically corrupt everything she
is trying to do. She spends most of the book feeling like what she's
doing is futile, or hoping for things the reader knows aren't going to
happen. Given that this is happening during plodding map exploration
fantasy through largely indistinguishable faux-medieval countries, or
(later) somewhat more interesting but obviously irrelevant local politics
in a remote trading city, it's hard to avoid sharing that sense of
futility.
The other structural problem with
Shadow Scale is that the plot
coupons are people, which means this book has an excessive cast size
problem. Seraphina collects too many people for me to even keep straight,
let alone care about. Critical developments (usually for the worst) in
the lives of one of these characters were frequently met with reader
mutterings like, "Now which one was Brasidas again, was he the plague
doctor?" This tends to undermine the emotional impact. It didn't help
that the plot was enough of a slog that I kept putting the book aside for
a few days.
This does get better, but not enough better to redeem the middle of the
book, and one has to put up with a lot of helpless despair to get there.
Shadow Scale is one of those stories where the protagonist has the
innate power to resolve the plot, is told cryptically by various people
that this is the case, but has absolutely no idea how to use it and her
supposed mentors are essentially useless. The result is that she feels
both hopeless and guilty, which was not the reading experience I wanted.
I did enjoy the moment when she finally figures it out, and I thought
Hartman's idea was reasonably clever, but it would have been better if
that had happened faster. Like, 200 pages faster. At least.
The major world-building in
Seraphina was the dragons. The dragons
also show up in this book (and feel less like autism spectrum archetypes,
which I appreciated), and in theory are central to the plot, but I'm not
entirely sure why? It was an odd reading experience. I think Hartman was
attempting to set up dual villains posing different threats, but the
dragon one is off-screen for nearly the entire book and never developed,
so it feels perfunctory. Near the end of the book, Hartman abruptly picks
up the dragons again, but that whole section felt oddly disconnected from
the rest of the plot and is only barely relevant to the resolution. At
least for me, the plot structure didn't cohere.
Shadow Scale does go up a whole point in rating for me because of
the romance plot and how Hartman resolves it, which I will not spoil but
which I loved. The process of getting there is immensely frustrating
because it feels like Hartman is forcing the characters into a corner
where only stupid resolutions are possible, but in this case the U-shaped
emotional structure worked on me. The ending is completely true to the
characters in a way that I thought Hartman had made impossible (and which
does a lovely bit of undermining of traditional roles), so full credit
there. It helped that the relationship is put on ice for most of the book
and only appears at the end (which is also the best part of the book), so
it didn't drag on like the other parts of the plot.
Overall, though, I tentatively agree with the general advice to skip this
one, and suspect that advice will become less tentative once I read
Tess of the Road. It's a largely unpleasant slog. There are some
mildly interesting world-building revelations that fill in the background
of
Seraphina, the ending was reasonably good, and the relationships
were much better than I was expecting through most of the book, but the
amount of time and patience required to get there was not a good trade-off
for me.
Followed (in the sense that it's set in the same universe but is not a
sequel and I suspect does not depend heavily on this plot) by
Tess
of the Road.
Rating: 4 out of 10
Last year I started collecting ideas of things I would like to 3D print
one day, on Twitter. Twitter is fundamentally ephemeral, so I'll collect
it here instead. I got up to 14 items on Twitter, and now I'm up to 25.
I don't own a 3D printer, but I have access to one at the work office.
Perhaps this list is my subconcious trying to convince me to buy one.
What am I missing? What else should I be thinking of printing? Let me
know!
We (Robert Tari, the UBports developers team, myself) are very close to releasing Ayatana Indicators 0.9.x. The work on Ayatana Indicators is currently nearly completed funded by the UBports Foundation and over the past half year, many many changes, improvements and clean-ups have been added to the code.
Ayatana Indicators 0.9.x will be the first release series to be in the development tree of Ubuntu Touch 20.04 (which is currently under very heavy development).
Ayatana Indicators 0.9.x will also be used in various other desktop environments available in upcoming Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, such as Ubuntu MATE, Xubuntu, (optionally in) Ubuntu Budgie (please correct my wording, if you know better), (send me a note, if I forgot your desktop env), etc.
So, to all Ubuntu Touch, Ubuntu MATE, Xubuntu, etc. users. If you not already are a translator of Ayatana Indicators and you are good in English and fluent in at least one other language, please consider helping out with translating or improving translations of Ayatana Indicators.
The translation work needs to be done on Hosted Weblate [1], please sign up for an account (if you haven't done so, yet) and chime in.
Thanks so much for your contributions!
light+love
The 
Another new release of 
The complete list changes for this release follows.
For some months now I ve been working on some patches to
So I decided to create a solution for this, always thinking about simplicity and in a way that makes it easy to get this missing functionality. I started by creating an input array pattern using 
Almost a year ago I added a script made by