A little messy but quite captivating After reading all of Rachel Hartman's books about Seraphina and Tess, the Southlands series, namely Tess of the Road and In the serpent’s Wake, turned out to be the most exciting. Although it seemed to me that the author had not yet decided what genre and writing style she would like to write in. The Seraphina series of books is focused on fantasy, and the Tess series is more related to adventures with a dose of fantasy. The format of writing the books also confuses me a little, the first two books were written in the first person, the first book about Tess told only about the adventures of Tess in the second person, while this book contains several narrative lines in the second person. The history of the islands is also quite incomprehensible, perhaps only to me, there are quite a lot of nations and branches from them, there are also quite a lot of main characters, it is not always possible to quickly and easily remember who we are talking about but as a big fan of adventure books, I can highly appreciate the book’s richness with all sorts of events and unexpected turns. It would be interesting to read more books by this author, since in my opinion she found her genre and writing style in the last book in which she should develop. ( )

I would recommend this book (and it's prequel) to older teen fans of fantasy. I enjoyed it although I have to say I didn't realise this was book 2 when I won it. I found a copy of Tess and was pleased to have the story continue 2 times as long as I expected. ( )

It was a good book ( )

I found this one a bit difficult to follow with the different narrations and lack of clarity on who's point of view it was. I had not read the previous book in this series and perhaps that was the issue. ( )

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/in-the-serpents-wake-by-rachel-hartman/

In the Serpent’s Wake takes Tess on a polar expedition led by a hilariously unperceptive aristocratic lady, where they tour also colonialism and rape culture. It didn’t move me quite as much as the previous book – seemed to be a lot of circumpolar circling – but I still enjoyed it a lot. Hartman’s imagined world is richly drawn and internally consistent. Worth getting all four books in the series for the YA reader in your life. ( )