Rachel Hartman Books in Order

If you want the core Goredd reading path: Seraphina → Shadow Scale → Tess of the Road → In the Serpent's Wake
If you want the most intimate, character-first entry: Tess of the Road → In the Serpent's Wake
If you want a standalone set earlier in the world: Among Ghosts

Rachel Hartman was born in Kentucky in 1972, and she grew up moving through a long list of places, including Lexington, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, England, and Japan. That mix of homes shows up in her fiction, which is full of borders, translations, uneasy truces, and people trying to figure out where they belong. She later studied comparative literature at Washington University in St. Louis, a good fit for a writer who clearly likes stories that talk to other stories.

Music came early.

As a child, Hartman played cello and lip synched Mozart operas with her sisters, and that love of music never really left. Before she became known for novels, she spent years making comics. After college she thought about graduate school, then changed course and decided to be a comic book artist instead. She wrote, drew, photocopied, and stapled her own minicomic, Amy Unbounded, and sold it at conventions while also working in bookstores.

Goredd started young.

Hartman has said the world behind Seraphina first showed up in a school poetry assignment. She kept returning to it while making comics, and some characters from Amy Unbounded later found their way into her fiction. In her early thirties, while pregnant with her son and preparing for a move across the continent, she finally started the novel that would become Seraphina. She wrote in short stretches while the baby napped, and the book took years, several complete rewrites, and more than one false start before it was ready.

That long road paid off. When Seraphina arrived in 2012, readers found a fantasy novel that cared as much about music, religion, and court politics as it did about dragons. The book won the William C. Morris Award and the Cybils Award, and it introduced Hartman as a writer who could build a large world without losing sight of one complicated young person at its center. Shadow Scale widened that story into a bigger conflict, sending Seraphina across the Southlands to find others like her before war takes hold.

Hartman then shifted her focus in a smart, risky way. Instead of staying with the same heroine, she moved to Seraphina's half sister in Tess of the Road. That book, and its sequel In the Serpent's Wake, keeps the dragons and strange lore of Goredd but turns inward too, toward shame, freedom, faith, healing, and the slow work of making a life after harm. Readers who love her later books often talk about the emotional honesty as much as the fantasy setting.

She keeps finding new corners of the same world.

In 2025, Hartman published Among Ghosts, a standalone novel set in Goredd about a century before Seraphina. It shows another side of what she does well: young people under pressure, old histories that refuse to stay buried, and settings that feel weathered, lived in, and a little haunted. Across all these books, the recurring threads are pretty clear. She writes outsiders, mixed identities, broken systems, and the stubborn hope that people can still choose decency.

Hartman lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with her husband and whippet. Her official bio also notes a love of reading, role-playing games, and the cello, which feels very in character. If you pick up her books for dragons, you will get dragons. You will also get music, arguments about belief and duty, and people learning, sometimes painfully, how to tell the truth about themselves.