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A review by distilledreads
The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon
adventurous
dark
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
The Bone Season is dark, with a significant amount of violence, emotional manipulation, and physical abuse. While this book and subsequent series may not be for everyone because of that, I really enjoyed it. Like, stayed up until the wee hours of the morning because I couldn’t bring myself to stop reading it kind of enjoyment. I needed to know what was going to happen next.
To begin with, there is a lot of world-building and orders of magic that need to be explained. Rather than attempt to remember everything as I was reading it for the first time, I let myself be carried along for the ride and eventually the slang stuck. That leniency for the first 100 and so pages really helped my enjoyment of the novel and its world. I think if you try too hard to make sense of the different orders and types of clairvoyancy that are being thrown at you in this futuristic-yet-Victorian, alternate-universe London, it would become overwhelming very easily.
Shannon does a fairly good job at world-building in a way that feels natural by having characters from different backgrounds being confused by what’s going on and requiring an explanation from another character, but it is still a fair bit of info-dumping. For that reason, and our male protagonist, this was a four-star read for me instead of higher.
As for said male protagonist, Warden, or Arcturus, I really want to hate him. In fact, I do hate the origin story of him and Paige Mahoney, our main character, but even as I was hating him, I found myself giddy at the tension between the pair.
When Paige is captured and imprisoned in the alternate-universe Oxford, she is “acquired” by the Warden who becomes her keeper, which straddles the line of a very dangerous, toxic trope. The Warden doesn’t help matters by being on the bad side of morally grey. On top of that trope, the Warden is also an other-worldly creature known as a Rephaite, so there is forbidden love and enemies-to-lovers tangled up in here. Especially during the first half of the book, his actions are damnable…but dammit I still liked his character. My hope is that the power imbalance between the pair levels out in the next book(s), which is to say that I’ll still definitely be continuing on with the series.
To begin with, there is a lot of world-building and orders of magic that need to be explained. Rather than attempt to remember everything as I was reading it for the first time, I let myself be carried along for the ride and eventually the slang stuck. That leniency for the first 100 and so pages really helped my enjoyment of the novel and its world. I think if you try too hard to make sense of the different orders and types of clairvoyancy that are being thrown at you in this futuristic-yet-Victorian, alternate-universe London, it would become overwhelming very easily.
Shannon does a fairly good job at world-building in a way that feels natural by having characters from different backgrounds being confused by what’s going on and requiring an explanation from another character, but it is still a fair bit of info-dumping. For that reason, and our male protagonist, this was a four-star read for me instead of higher.
As for said male protagonist, Warden, or Arcturus, I really want to hate him. In fact, I do hate the origin story of him and Paige Mahoney, our main character, but even as I was hating him, I found myself giddy at the tension between the pair.
When Paige is captured and imprisoned in the alternate-universe Oxford, she is “acquired” by the Warden who becomes her keeper, which straddles the line of a very dangerous, toxic trope. The Warden doesn’t help matters by being on the bad side of morally grey. On top of that trope, the Warden is also an other-worldly creature known as a Rephaite, so there is forbidden love and enemies-to-lovers tangled up in here. Especially during the first half of the book, his actions are damnable…but dammit I still liked his character. My hope is that the power imbalance between the pair levels out in the next book(s), which is to say that I’ll still definitely be continuing on with the series.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Confinement, Death, Drug use, Emotional abuse, Physical abuse, Xenophobia, Blood, Trafficking, and Kidnapping