Review: The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon

The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon
Published: August 20, 2013
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Pages: 480 (Paperback)
Series: The Bone Season #1
Source: Publisher
My Rating: 4 of 5 stars

It is the year 2059. Several major world cities are under the control of a security force called Scion. Paige Mahoney works in the criminal underworld of Scion London, part of a secret cell known as the Seven Seals. The work she does is unusual: scouting for information by breaking into others' minds. Paige is a dreamwalker, a rare kind of clairvoyant, and in this world, the voyants commit treason simply by breathing.

But when Paige is captured and arrested, she encounters a power more sinister even than Scion. The voyant prison is a separate city - Oxford, erased from the map two centuries ago and now controlled by a powerful otherworldly race. These creatures, the Rephaim, value the voyants highly - as soldiers in their army.

Paige is assigned to a Rephaite keeper, Warden, who will be in charge of her care and training. He is her master. her natural enemy. But if she wants to regain her freedom, Paige will have to learn something of his mind and his own mysterious motives.

The Bone Season introduces a compelling heroine - a young woman learning to harness her powers in a world where everything has been taken from her. It also introduces and extraordinary young writer, with huge ambition and a teeming imagination. Samantha Shannon has created a bold new reality in this riveting debut.

The Bone Season is everything I wanted and maybe even a little bit more. Ever since I was little I've always had this sort of fascination with the clairvoyant and for some reason I love books that incorporate organized crime. Add a little dystopian and that's pretty much an ideal book for me. So it's no wonder I tore through this book.

The world building is by far the best part of this book. It was extremely complex and obviously well thought out. The info dumping during the beginning of the book slowed the pace down a bit, but I hardly even noticed because I was too wrapped up in the story. The whole world is so carefully constructed and imaginative that it was easy to get lost in the story.

The Seven Seals don't come into play until the very end of the book, but through Paige's memories the reader gets to know more about the mime-lord's gang, so even though they weren't there for most of the book, I still felt attached to them. Paige, one of the Seven Seals, is more complex than I originally thought. From the moment I started reading I thought was another typical strong female character, which isn't bad, but sometimes it's nice to read about someone that isn't invincible and able to get out of every single situation with minor issues. Instead I was happily surprised that not only could she hold her own in a fight for at least a little while, but she also had plausible emotions and she wasn't invincible.

For the most part, I'm indifferent to Warden, mostly because I still don't understand his motives. I don't want him to die, but that's about as far as my feelings for him go because I don't feel like there was much to sympathize with since I don't understand why he does what he does. He's at least a couple centuries old, but I wasn't sure if he looked young or not, so the idea of him having a relationship with Paige was not the first thing on my mind. I wasn't surprised that something developed between them, but I also wasn't sure if I liked it at first because he acts and is so much older than her. A few years isn't that big of a gap, but a few centuries is just a tiny bit to big. If I ignore the age gap, I would probably like them together a lot more because from the beginning its where their relationship seemed to be going, so it wasn't like it came out of nowhere.

I will definitely be looking out for the sequel because overall the book was fantastic. Plus the next book is called The Mime Order and I would love to read more about the mime-lords and mime-queens.

*I received this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review