Book Review – Seraphina

If you happened to be watching my Twitter feed last week you will have noticed some discussion between Aliette de Bodard, Rachel Swirsky and myself regarding Rachel Hartman’s novel, Seraphina. I managed to find some time yesterday to write some book reviews, and Seraphina was top of the list of books to address. You can see that I wrote here. You should note that my comments are necessarily spoiler-full, and what I wrote is more a critical analysis of the issues raised on Twitter than a review of the book. If you are OK with that, I think it is worth reading because I think the fact that different people can legitimately have very different reactions to a book, depending on the cultural context from which they approach it, is very important, and often overlooked, both by reviewers and by those who rant on the Internet.