In the Serpent's Wake by Rachel Hartman

In the Serpent's Wake by Rachel Hartman

If I particularly enjoy a book I read for the Hugo Awards, I make it a point of trying to pick up any sequels when they come out; part of the reason I started voting was, after all, to gain better exposure to contemporary sf&f. I read Rachel Hartman's Tess of the Road in 2019, when it was a finalist for the Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book, and I ranked it first. Tess was about a young woman named Tess learning to find her place in the world after a horrific event, and it ended with the promise of further adventure, with her signing aboard a sailing ship on a voyage of discovery. In 2022, the sequel was finally released, chronicling that sea voyage.

Published: 2022
Read: December 2022

Sequels are tricky business, and maybe especially in science fiction and fantasy. I feel like there is a tendency for a first book to be focused on a single point-of-view character and their adventures, and then the sequel opens up the world a bit, both by sending the protagonist into a different part of it, but also by adding new viewpoint characters. This happened in Arkady Martine's A Desolation Called Peace, the sequel to A Memory Called Empire, it happened in Seth Dickinson's The Monster Baru Cormorant, the sequel to The Traitor Baru Cormorant, and it happened here. In all three of these cases, alas, it did not work for me. While the first book in each of these series feels focused and gains power from its singular focus, I found myself uncertain in each follow up about what the book was trying to do.

In the Serpent's Wake follows not just Tess, but various other people, both on her ship and off, searching for the last Serpent. Tess finds conflict on the ship, and off it, as it visits various colonies of her home country, and she discovers that colonialism is a complicated force, even when you sympathize with the colonizers... and it turns out that the naturalist she is apprenticed to is actually married to her rapist! It's kind of a lot, and I felt like the book didn't have a lot of momentum as a result. Like, in theory we're on this big quest, but the characters don't really do much on the quest because they're always stopping places. I think this is all intended to add to Tess's character arc, but I felt like what this arc actually was was nebulous in a way that was not true of the clear arc of Tess of the Road. 

There's a lot of good worldbuilding, but there's a lot of other stuff in it, and I didn't really know what it was all for. The book is trying to demonstrate Tess's growth, but also explore issues of imperialism, and these things didn't have a clear link. The return of the rapist really derailed the narrative, too; it seemed too consequential to really fit in here, like it should have changed the book more than it did. And then also Tess happens to bump into a different man who was awful to her! The book is trying to say something about masculinity and power and empire, but it was too muddled for me to follow the thread of it. I wish there had been a clearer focus on the ship characters, who at the beginning of the novel seem quite important but eventually fall by the wayside and thus the work spent setting them up comes across as wasted.

Also there's a bit where one of the characters paraphrases the Star Trek narration: “And who knows what new life we will find beneath the sea? What strange creatures and lost civilizations? We Ninysh shall go—dare I say boldly?—where no one has ever gone before.” I get what Hartman is doing, she's critiquing these colonialist narratives of exploration (someone always already lives where you are going) but it totally threw me out of the book.

So what worked for me about the first was just not present in the sequel. I don't think I can fault Hartman for this—sequels should also not slavishly reproduce the first book over again—but I was sadly disappointed in this book, given how much I enjoyed Tess of the Road. I wanted to love it again but it isn't what I loved before.