Seraphina, Shadow Scale, and the Dragons of Childhood

In Rachel Hartman’s young adult duology, Seraphina and Shadow Scale, humans and dragons have lived in uneasy truce for 40 years. Seraphina Dombegh is the daughter of a wholly illegal love affair between a human and a shifting dragon in human form; no one can know she’s a half-breed. She bears the mark of her dragon lineage on her body in the form of scales on her waist and arms, and in her mind as maternal memory (though her mother is dead). At 16, she finally leaves the stifling protection of her family home to apprentice her musical craft in the capital. Early in her sojourn, one of the princes of the realm is murdered in a way that suggests the involvement of dragons, which could easily turn into the pretext for war.
The rush that Seraphina feels while tentatively, carefully making friends and exploring her city felt so true to me, as did her terror that anyone would discover the scales on her skin. Her bodily discomfort is a coded and heightened form of the very real social anxiety I felt as a teen (and occasionally do now, to be honest): I am going to say the wrong thing, and everyone is going to know. But when she relaxes and forgets herself, as when she falls into arguing philosophy with the passionate naiveté of the freshman, she finds her fears hold more power when they are guarded. She finds people she can trust, and some she can love. As Seraphina draws to a close, the political situation has only grown more precarious and dangerous, but there is a strange, soaring quality to the ending: she has begun to understand who she is, and how she fits.

Shadow Scale begins with this bright sense of danger and adventure. Seraphina leaves Goredd at the behest of the queen and her consort, who have become both allies and friends, to find the half-dragons. She knows these they exist because of her sympathetic mental connection with her own kind, but has only met a few. With a foot in each world, the half-breeds are the best chance for diplomacy between the humans and dragons. Shadow Scale settles into a journey narrative, with Seraphina and a collection of diplomats, soldiers, and half-dragons traveling through countries that only get more foreign with distance. They are lucky and successful in their initial introductions, and Seraphina grows more and more confident. This is, of course, when the other shoes drops.
When Seraphina was a child, a half-dragon named Jannoula hooked into and sought control of her mind. Cruelly mistreated in her youth, she tried to escape into Seraphina, an understandable grasping at relief, but also a gross violation and betrayal. As Seraphina gathers the half-dragons, Jannoula uses that lingering connection (and, in no small part, Seraphina’s guilt) to infest everyone Seraphina loves, subtly altering their motivations and guiding their actions. All of her new friendships tainted and twisted, Seraphina’s return to the emotional isolation of her youth is devastating. Jannoula is Seraphina’s dark mirror: a force toward fracture between humans and dragons. Serphina must return home and try to set things to right, but the road is rocky and bent.
The Seraphina duology’s use of the dragon as a marker for itchy adolescence and the skin-shedding pain of matriculation is a lovely invocation and subtle inversion of a classical tale of dragon slaying. Hunting the dragon is often a critical moment in a hero’s journey, the danger that sends the untested out of their homes to mark their quality. Dragons have tested Beowulf and Bilbo, Sparrowhawk and Sigurd. Here, instead, we have two half-creatures in opposition, and the kindred half-dragon is more antagonist than either human or dragon; we are often our own worst enemies. Shadow Scale uses the dragons of my youthful reading in the service of a young woman’s coming of age, but she is the being that must leap into glittering flame.