YAY!!!! I love all things Rachel Hartman. This book was HEAVY with all of the things that Tess goes through. I love how it is told with flashbacks--you never quite know how the story is going to come together until the very end. I have missed Serafina and her world. It was so awesome to learn her half sister's side of the story.

This took me a very, very long time to get into and I nearly stopped reading at about the 30% mark. Actually, I did stop reading and then go on to read other more exciting things, and then I ran out of books in my luggage except for one I didn't really want to read, so I went back to this one and then I finished it off and it wasn't so bad.

...I think it was just a matter of the wrong book at the wrong time. It deals with weighty, important matters, like how your past shouldn't define your future, and rape and coercion, and the fact that we are always forgiving of dashing young pirates, if they are male, but not confused young maidens who are no longer virgins.

This makes it a very hard, but impactful, book to read--and maybe even a little troublesome, especially if you're one to always defend the Church and its preachers. Well, it's obvious it isn't the Church, but it is, isn't it?

This a story about suffering and the great long path from it, how hard it can be, how cruel the world can be, but that there are endless reasons never to give up, and that effort wasn’t for nothing. It’s an acknowledgment that no matter how alone you feel, you are never truly alone, and no matter how far down society thinks they can push you, you can still be relisent, both in strong and soft ways, giving their labels no mind to you.

Tess and her twin sister are the younger siblings to the part-dragon music master, Seraphina. After Tess disrupts her twin's wedding, she takes off not knowing her destination or her future. She just needs to get away from her past. Luckily she runs into an old friend who provides companionship, direction, and purpose. On their journey, Tess discovers her inner strength while the reader slowly finds out what she is running from.

Thank you so much for making this book available for Hugo voters. After I have read it I will submit my review to NetGalley, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Angus & Robertson, and Booktopia.

Hartman's latest book in this fantasy series continues the story arc while addressing issues of substance abuse within family dynamics. Recommend!

Tess of the Road is about a young women’s journey to figure out what type person she should be. Tess is a smart girl who does not deal with nonsense very well. Tess gets into trouble at her sister’s wedding reception and flees the unpleasant fate her family had planned for her. She finds a friend who had gone through some big changes. This friend is on a quest for ancient knowledge. Tess joins her friend and they have a lot of adventures along the way. This is a fascinating ride. Though are challenges along the way, Tess finds a freedom outside she could never have at home.

This book took forever to get started. For-e-ver. I just couldn't get into it for a really long time. I struggle with reading long periods of deep self-loathing, especially when it clearly isn't warranted. It absolutely made Tess's journey feel warranted and her emotional triumphs satisfying. But oy.

Tess of the Road by Rachel Hartman was shortlisted for the inaugural YA Hugo award, to be awarded at the World Science Fiction Convention this weekend. That was the main reason I read it. Tess of the Road is a spin-off of a YA series that I was aware of, but which didn’t grab my attention (I think, based on what I now know, this was because the marketing and cover gave the wrong impression of the book). I started all the Hugo-nominated YA books but one, and Tess of the Road was the only one that interested me enough to keep reading (though I might come back to one or two of the others later).

In the medieval kingdom of Goredd, women are expected to be ladies, men are their protectors, and dragons get to be whomever they want. Tess, stubbornly, is a troublemaker. You can’t make a scene at your sister’s wedding and break a relative’s nose with one punch (no matter how pompous he is) and not suffer the consequences. As her family plans to send her to a nunnery, Tess yanks on her boots and sets out on a journey across the Southlands, alone and pretending to be a boy.

Where Tess is headed is a mystery, even to her. So when she runs into an old friend, it’s a stroke of luck. This friend is a quigutl—a subspecies of dragon—who gives her both a purpose and protection on the road. But Tess is guarding a troubling secret. Her tumultuous past is a heavy burden to carry, and the memories she’s tried to forget threaten to expose her to the world in more ways than one.

Tess is a teen in a world that expects people like her to be getting married and thinking of having babies. Because her family has fallen on hard times, she has spent the past couple of years working towards getting her twin sister a wealthy husband. Even though Tess is technically the older twin, scandalous events from her past have lead her family to pretend that honour falls on the other twin. This past and the way in which it was slowly explained throughout the book is what first grabbed my attention. What kept my attention was the world building and the interesting non-human races that feature.

As can be guessed from the title, Tess breaks free from the expectations of society and sets out on the road. She has a series of adventures, which make up the story and are tied together by a quest her (non-human) companion/childhood friend is undertaking. Throughout the book, we see Tess grow. She starts off as an alcoholic, but through walking and manual labour and a few other key events comes to confront and come to terms with her past.

As I said, I enjoyed this book, particularly the world building. It was on the long side and I felt it dragged a bit in the middle, exacerbating it’s length, however, it overall held my attention well, especially the opening chunk and the ending. The end made me think there might be a sequel, though I wasn’t sure if that would be the case until the very end. I would be interested in reading it. Also, having read this spin off, I am certainly considering going back to the original series about Seraphina, Tess’s sister, at some point. I recommend this book to fans of YA, coming of age stories and particularly the kind of YA which does not involve saving the world.

4 / 5 stars

First published: Random House, 2018
Series: Same world as the Seraphina series and the first book of a new series
Format read: eARC
Source: Hugo voter packet

In the medieval-style kingdom of Goredd, women are supposed to be demure and ladylike. Tess, however, is not. She would rather be educated and debate academic topics than sit and sew. After making a fool of herself at her sister's wedding, Tess is bound for the convent - but not on her watch! She pulls on her boots and hits the road to who-knows-where.
A chance encounter leads to a reunion with an old friend - a subspecies of dragon known as a quigutl - who has some plans of his own. The two set out together - Pathka in search of a mythical being, and Tess running away from a secret that she just can't get away from.

My Notes: I didn't realize this was set in the same world as Seraphina, which I have not yet read, and I think I may have gotten a better grasp of the setting if I'd read that one first, but it is a lovely stand-alone story. I didn't necessarily like Tess, and I didn't agree with a lot of her choices, but I enjoyed the book immensely.

Perhaps not as enthralling as the first book in the series but none the less, I enjoyed the unique world-building and strong female protagonist.

Nope. Not a book for me. I can't recall if I read the Serephina series anymore or if I did, even enjoyed it or not. I am gathering from other reviewers that I should maybe I should have read those books before this one. Oh, well, I know the series has it's fans as the book has done pretty well in libraries. I'm not sure of the age group for it- older teens? Adults? Subject matter is a bit much for younger kids, though maybe some might get into it. I love a good adventure book and thought this would be one, but no. Not my sort. Sorry.

Was a book that fell flat for me, which was extremely disappointing. The one thing I really enjoyed about this book was the writing style.

I was nervous to read Tess of the Road because I know how passionately Adri loves the novel, how hard she has championed it not just for the Lodestar but also as a potential contender for Best Novel. What if I don’t like it? What if I hate it? It’s not that our reading tastes line up perfectly anyway (she doesn’t love The Calculating Stars and I don’t understand), but still. So, with a small amount of trepidation and a moderate amount of excitement, I started to read Tess of the Road. Friends, I didn’t love it. It was only because of Adri’s enthusiasm that I pushed through beyond the midpoint of the novel because those first chapters, even up to nearly the first half of the novel, were not working for me. I had decided to not re-read Adri’s review of the novel because I didn’t want to have someone else’s take fresh in my mind, but I was curious what she saw in Tess of the Road.

I kept reading and something changed around the point we got to the road crew and the old nun. I think it was where we saw more of Tess’s change, where Tess had fewer moments of raw desperation to survive or escape and more time forming into the woman she would become. That’s where I began to be sold on the novel. The first half of the novel is necessary for the second half to have meaning (or to even be understandable), but I was fully engaged and excited during that second half and completely disinterested in the opening section of the novel. I do recommend you read Adri’s thoughts on the novel for another perspective. Also, there is a moment very late in the novel that functionally amounts to a recounting of most of what Tess did during the novel and it shouldn’t work. It’s a summary in the form of conversation, and it’s a beautiful capstone to Tess of the Road, a novel that I appreciated far more by the end than I ever thought I midway through the story.

This is a frustrating book.

We first meet the titular Tess as a little girl full of energy and imagination, and a challenge to her joy-killing mother. Then we quickly jump ahead playing maid and "younger sister" to Jeanne, who is her younger twin and now a maid of honor at the royal court. In the intervening years, we gradually learn, Tess managed to ruin herself, give birth to a bastard whose existence was concealed by sending Tess to stay with her grandmother, and demonstrate a complete inability to be sufficiently meek and rule-following to have much chance anyway at the kind of husband the family needs to repair its fortunes. Those fortunes were destroyed when the truth came out about their father's first marriage--his first wife was a dragon, and his oldest daughter, Seraphina, is a dragon. He lost his licence to practice law. They can't afford for Tess's disgrace to come out, too.

Tess at this point in her life is unhappy and resentful, though Jeanne may be the only member of her family she loves. Not soon enough, we jump ahead to Tess running away, which, unexpectedly, is the start of her doing things that aren't willfully stupid and self-destructive.

Not that a sixteen-year-old girl running away, with no skills to support herself except as a seamstress, in a fairly sexist medieval culture, is exactly clever. Yet Tess does have a good brain, and away from the stifling influence of her family, she starts, very slowly, to use it.

She also meets up with a childhood friend, a quigutl named Pathka. Quigutls are lizards, somewhat similar to dragons, though they don't fly, and they and the dragons don't like each other. Pathka has his own problems, but he does care about Tess, and Tess about him, and they both start, a little bit, to think about people outside themselves. And while Tess continues to hear her mother's voice inside her head telling her how very bad she is, and how she's responsible for pretty much every bad thing that happens around her, once she starts looking around, she stars trying to do what good she can, wherever she passes. The more she practices, the better she gets at it, and often, when she's looking at other people's problems rather than her own, her ideas are pretty smart.

It's really too bad that we keep getting flashbacks to Tess's earlier experiences, when she was follish and bitter and did willfully self-destructive things.

I really, really like the person Tess develops into. She has great adventures, and we see an interesting world. The book is well-written.

But it takes too long for Tess to start being more interesting, and we then get dragged back to her earlier experiences and behavior too often and for too long. On balance, this is not a book that will encourage me to read more in this fictional world.

Very much a mixed bag.

I received this book as part of the 2019 Hugo Voters Packet.

3.5 rounded up. Starts slow, but gets better. A book about journeys more than resolutions. Tess isn't what one would call a "likeable" heroine, but she is lovable (even if it takes a while). Her issues echo back to our world, while still an issue in hers.

Ever read a book where you cry the entire time? Every chapter is filled with love and guilt and shame and joy? When you empathize so completely with the narrator?

This book. It really resonated with me. Your mileage may vary.

When asked what this book was about I replied, "It's about a girl who's on a journey with her lesser-dragon companion to find a mythical beast." I guess that's this book in a very brief description, but it's really about so much more than that. Tess of the Road is very philosophical and introspective. It's about healing from abuse, not fitting into your family, figuring out how to make your own way, and proving that you are capable.

Tess of the Road is a hero's journey in the traditional sense because it really is a journey of self-discovery for Tess. And that self-discovery involves a heap of feminism and a dismantling of rape culture. Don't expect tons of action. Expect all those things I listed above.

I love Rachel Hartman's Seraphina. It's in my top-ten books. And Janoula is in my top-ten scariest villains ever. I was excited to see that she was adding to this world because it is such a fantastic world. I like the medieval-inspired feel of these novels. I really like a fantasy with an interesting religion, and this one, with its saints and monks and nuns, tops them all.

This was an excellent book. It took me a few chapters to start understanding the world, but after that I greatly enjoyed reading it. The world is very well-constructed, and although I can sometimes see the shadow of the previous book, this one still works well as an introduction point (and made me look forward to looking up Seraphina).

What a breath of fresh air! My favorite part of the book was Tess while on the Road.

The Road meant freedom to Tess, including the chance to finally find herself, after years of dealing with others' expectations of her.

Yes, of course this is a coming-of-age novel. But I really enjoyed Tess's insistence on finding her own way on this journey.

Highly recommended for both young adult and also adult fantasy readers!