I had a difficult time starting Tess of the Road. It was slow going, and the main character was... well, she was insufferable. She was making every mistake, and just ruining everything for everyone. Especially herself. And me, as the reader. Can I spend so many more hundreds of pages with this character? I asked myself that. Thanks to the positive review by Amal El-Mohtar, I did. Amal has excellent taste, you see. By which I mean I usually like the stuff she likes.
As the novel unfolds, I discovered that every one of the bugs of the early stages was, in fact, a feature. Presenting a genuinely broken character, and slowly revealing in full the reasons for it - as she works to heal herself - can be a powerful tool, and it is extremely effective here. Tess is, at the end of the novel, a remarkable character, complex, difficult, but incredibly lovable.
Let's back up a bit, though. Tess of the Road is a companion novel of sorts to the author's Seraphina novels. Tess, herself, is one of the younger sisters of half-dragon Seraphina, and the older sister is very much a presence in the novel. It takes place after the upheaval of the Seraphina duology, and is informed by it. A young woman, having messed up one time too many and bound to be sent to a convent, decides to run away. She meets an old friend and decides to join their quest. Adventure ensues.
But while this novel has adventure (and plenty of it), it's not about adventure. It's about people, and relationships, and feelings. And it is both a rollicking adventure and a very good novel about those things. There is genuine emotional pain and hurt, and at times I've had to take a break to settle myself. But once I was really into the book, breaks became all but impossible. As long as it is, I gulped up most of it in the past two days.
I would strongly recommend Tess of the Road to any and all fans of fantasy fiction.