For those who “trod the line” between worlds

Spoiler Alert: If you have not read either Seraphina or its sequel, Shadow Scale, and you intend to and want to avoid spoilers, read no further. Otherwise, proceed at your peril. You have been warned. :)

I just finished reading Shadow Scale by Rachel Hartman, the sequel to her fantasy novel, Seraphina. You may wonder why an adult in her sixties would invest so much time in reading a pair of young adult (YA) novels. I accidentally read Seraphina. I like to listen to audio books on loan from my local library as I take walks, and, desperate for something to listen to, I picked out Seraphina, not realizing it was a YA book. But having made that mistake, I couldn’t resist listening to it. The title character is a musician and a teenager, naturally, but she carries the burden of a very adult secret: she is a half-dragon.

In Hartman’s fantasy world, akin to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, dragons and humans uneasily coexist. After centuries of warfare between humans and dragons, a 40-year peace has finally prevailed between the two species, but in Goredd (Seraphina’s native land in the Southlands), half-dragons are scorned as abominations to be shunned or worse, according to the Saints, who are revered throughout the Southlands.

Obviously, as Seraphina struggles with her secret nature, she deals with a lot of issues common to all teenagers, who struggle with their identities: fear, shame, insecurity, anxiety about acceptance not only by society at large but by peers and potential lovers as well.  In Seraphina’s case, her love interest is Prince Lucian Kiggs, cousin to the heir to the throne of Goredd, Glisselda, one of Seraphina’s music pupils as well as a good friend. Of course, as an adult I’m over my teenage angst (or at least most of it), but as a transgendered person with a dual nature that I felt I must hide, I still identified with Seraphina. And I couldn’t help wondering if Hartman were, in fact, subtly sending a message about the transgendered as well as teenagers at large.

That alone, I suppose, ought to have been enough to motivate me to read the sequel, Shadow Scale. (Unfortunately, there’s no audio book version. I had to read the hard copy like in the old days.) But Hartman has an infuriating and intriguing resistance to neat endings. Even though Kiggs and Seraphina clear the hurdle of Seraphina’s half-dragonhood by the end of Seraphina, the love triangle between Kiggs, Glisselda, and Seraphina remains maddeningly unresolved.

So, naturally, I felt compelled to read the sequel to find out who gets whom. Unfortunately, at the end of Shadow Scale, the answer to this question remains rather muddy. This may be because, as a YA author, Hartman has to be circumspect, or perhaps ambiguity is inherent in Seraphina’s nature. Here’s what Seraphina says of herself at the end of Shadow Scale:  “Those of us who trod the line between [worlds] were blessed and burdened with both.” This alone may explain why she appears to enter into a threesome with Glisselda (now elevated to queen because of her mother’s death) and Kiggs. Apparently, Seraphina is bisexual (though Hartman doesn’t spell this out) and has relations with both Kiggs and Glisselda (more world-spanning by Seraphina). Glisselda, apparently, is a lesbian but, for appearances’ sake, wants to have an heir sired by her nominal husband (Kiggs), and Seraphina is good with this.

At least I can feel certain about this much: Hartman, in part, at least, is writing about the transgendered. While she does not use this modern term in her medieval fantasy, she does use the phrase in the imaginary language, Porphyry, “How may I pronoun you?” Seraphina asks this in relation to Camba, one of her fellow half-dragons, whom she meets in the course of Shadow Scale. Camba says of herself, “I was born into a masculine body, and I had misgendered myself.”

I am delighted to have some confirmation of my suspicion that my issues as a TG are getting aired in today’s popular YA books, so that, maybe, others of my ilk who are, currently, teenagers will have an easier time accepting themselves growing up than I did. In any case, while I would have preferred a more definitive ending to Seraphina’s saga, half a loaf is better than none.