Scan barcode
A review by brennanaphone
Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo
3.0
I entered the Grishaverse books with Six of Crows, even though I knew the first book was Shadow and Bone. I am so glad I did. If I had started with this book, I doubt I would have read beyond the first chapter.
I was shocked by how Twilight-y this started: Clumsy, obnoxious, not-like-other-girls teen girl protagonist with laughably pointless chosen-one storyline stuff gets into a love triangle with a down-to-earth friend and a hugely powerful, ancient fey sort of dude who is way too sexually aggressive. Why is that a trope. Why do we have so much of that.
I guess Bardugo agrees with me at least on that front, and partway through there were some good twists to the point that it pulled my rating up quite a bit (including a resounding refutation of Twilight and all it stands for, so I do appreciate that). The second half was punchier and had better intrigue, and I was invested enough by the end to probably read the rest of the series.
I wish that were enough, but overall the prose is fairly flat and direct, lacking the punchy metaphorical language in her later books. I was actively rooting against both romance options, which I feel is rarely a good thing. Maybe it's that I didn't really believe that these two kids who were raised as basically siblings ended up with such an awkward, chilly dynamic, much less an uncomfortable romance. Or maybe it was because I disliked the narrator so much: Alina is uninteresting, two-faced, and unkind to most of the people around her, but she has a real persecution complex at the same time.
Genya was the closest to a full person, and even she felt like a proto-Nina, so again it felt better to just read Six of Crows instead. I strongly believe that Bardugo should narrate only in the third person--her writing is much stronger for it.
I was shocked by how Twilight-y this started: Clumsy, obnoxious, not-like-other-girls teen girl protagonist with laughably pointless chosen-one storyline stuff gets into a love triangle with a down-to-earth friend and a hugely powerful, ancient fey sort of dude who is way too sexually aggressive. Why is that a trope. Why do we have so much of that.
I guess Bardugo agrees with me at least on that front, and partway through there were some good twists to the point that it pulled my rating up quite a bit (including a resounding refutation of Twilight and all it stands for, so I do appreciate that). The second half was punchier and had better intrigue, and I was invested enough by the end to probably read the rest of the series.
I wish that were enough, but overall the prose is fairly flat and direct, lacking the punchy metaphorical language in her later books. I was actively rooting against both romance options, which I feel is rarely a good thing. Maybe it's that I didn't really believe that these two kids who were raised as basically siblings ended up with such an awkward, chilly dynamic, much less an uncomfortable romance. Or maybe it was because I disliked the narrator so much: Alina is uninteresting, two-faced, and unkind to most of the people around her, but she has a real persecution complex at the same time.
Genya was the closest to a full person, and even she felt like a proto-Nina, so again it felt better to just read Six of Crows instead. I strongly believe that Bardugo should narrate only in the third person--her writing is much stronger for it.