You may have gathered from my post on ‘The Giver’ and ‘The Power’ that I love me some dystopian fiction. That was certainly the theme for 2017 as I read a number of amazing books (‘The Power’ excluded) which had some alternate universe, end of the world theme to them. Unfortunately after reading fantastic ones like Meg Elison’s ‘The Book of the Unnamed Midwife’ and ‘Gather the Daughter’ by Jennie Melamed, my standards are pretty damn high.
Side note: These two books are beyond amazing. If you love a good dystopian or a book with realistic female characters then they are a must.
So that might be why I didn’t get into Samantha Shannon’s ‘The Bone Season.’ It was lacking the wow factor for me and just a bit too complicated to really draw me in. That being said I did finish the book, so there must have been something there (Beauty and the Beast reference, anyone?)
I picked this one up as part of the library’s YA reading challenge to read a book written by someone under the age of 25. After googling this and beginning to feel like an idiot for being 28 and zero books to my name, I came across ‘The Bone Season’ which was written by Shannon when she was just 21. On paper this is everything I love about a book. It is set in a dystopian world (tick), with a female lead (tick) and the first of a series (tick, tick, tick!)
The story is set in 2059 in Scion London. This is a world where some people are clairvoyants and a security force called Scion has deemed this skill to be illegal and gained control over major cities. 19 year old Paige is a clairvoyant who works for the criminal underworld as a dream walker. She has a rare skill and is able to scout people’s dreams to gather valuable information. After accidentally killing two guards one day Paige is kidnapped by a group of otherworldly creature called the Rephaim. They take her to their underworld city where clairvoyants are used as slaves with the idea they will one day rise up and form the army against Scion. Still with me? I hope so because understanding this much took a bit of googling.
Where the story fails is that a lot of this detail isn’t explained well and it is only about 1/4 of the way into the book that you start to understand what is going on. Then, just as you start to feel comfortable in Scion you are taken out and the story re-sets in Oxford with the Rephaim who are their own confusing thing. I think Shannon fell into the trap of trying to create a new world and forgetting that while she understands it all the reader might need more explanation. The premise of the story begins with a confusing history in which Edward VII conducted a seance which killed many people and lead to the formation of a new London in which people with ‘unnatural’ powers were a thing. This timeline isn’t explained very well but just mentioned in bits and parts throughout the story and I feel like I would have been able to get into the book more if there had been a brief history lesson at the start. Like I said in my review of ‘The Giver’, good dystopian presents a world that is somewhat similar to ours so we can understand how it came to exist and get sucked into the story.
There were parts of this book that I liked and I did want to keep reading to find out what would happen to Paige. She was a likeable enough character and the romantic/sexual tension between her and Warden (the Rephaim who took responsibility of her in Oxford) had me hanging out for the ending. The story and world Shannon has created are enjoyable enough, it just takes a bit of reading and maybe some internet searching to understand it enough so you can read and take it all in.
Overall I would give this a three out of five stars. It was okay but I can’t say I will bother with the sequel, there is plenty of other dystopian fiction out there which does a better job.
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