Review: Shadow Scale, by Rachel Hartman

[Russ Allbery]

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

Reviewed: 2021-10-30

URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-375-89659-7.html

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>