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Seraphina: The Audition (2000)

by Rachel Hartman(Favorite Author)

4.05 of 5 Votes: 5

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English

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review 1: This was a cute little short story. I read it immediately after the prologue in SERAPHINA because it takes place between the prologue and chapter one. I'm glad I read it. It was cute, fun, and introduced us to a devilish princess and the even more devious main character, her soon-to-be music instructor. I loved the author's voice in the intimate first person narrative. The story opened up an intriguing world and makes me itch to dive into the first book!
review 2: I read Seraphina and the "The Audition" in one fell swoop, and love both, but I wish they were one book. I think "The Audition" would have been a better prologue to Seraphina than the existing prologue. "The Audition" really gives us a clear portrait of Orma's aloofness, Glisselda's spiritedness, an... mored Seraphina's intelligence. In Seraphina, although the princess's bright personality is essential to the story, less attention was given to developing it: we see her at first confused and intimidated by dragons, ever friendly to Phina, and at the end ready to grow into queenliness. The princess's ideas always seem goodhearted, but her motives (or even her motivation for goodness) do not always seem clear. Simply knowing that the princess is interested in statecraft, willful, and she's capable of laying traps -- as well as seeing her respectful first encounter with Phina -- would have added a great deal to how her character unfolds in Seraphina.Whereas I found that the prologue of Seraphina: her memory of being born, and her father's troubled interactions with her as a baby, added very little to the story, because it set us up for a father/daughter relationship that was under-explored. We only meet Seraphina's father a few times in the story, so he seems like more of a background figure -- a protective parent who doesn't want his daughter to draw attention to herself, someone with some sage advice about love -- than a full-fledged character with his own character conflicts ie. his feelings of inadequacy about taking care of his daughter. Seraphina's baptism and the foreshadowing of bodily grotesque could easily have been woven into other chapters, like her memories of Orma. less

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