The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon

Release Date: Out now!

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Pages: 466pgs

The Story

The year is 2059. Nineteen-year-old Paige Mahoney is working in the criminal underworld of Scion London, based at Seven Dials, employed by a man named Jaxon Hall. Her job: to scout for information by breaking into people’s minds. For Paige is a dreamwalker, a clairvoyant and, in the world of Scion, she commits treason simply by breathing.

It is raining the day her life changes for ever. Attacked, drugged and kidnapped, Paige is transported to Oxford – a city kept secret for two hundred years, controlled by a powerful, otherworldly race. Paige is assigned to Warden, a Rephaite with mysterious motives. He is her master. Her trainer. Her natural enemy. But if Paige wants to regain her freedom she must allow herself to be nurtured in this prison where she is meant to die.

The Review

A big thanks to Bloomsbury Australia for sending me a review copy of this book!

I hate book hype. I really do. I hate it when people - particularly those that have labeled this new author as the next J.K. Rowling - who bring up so much hype to the table before a book is even out yet because it leaves the rest of us readers with this huge expectation hanging over our heads and it frustrates me so, especially when the book ends up leaving you disappointed in the end and it's because of that hype alone. And in this case, as much as I really hate to say this, I was pretty disappointed with this book. Pretty disappointed indeed.

Now whether it was because I was not in the mood for this book right now or not, I was still disappointed in this new title which is a shame considering this was one of my most anticipated books of this year. Mostly because it sounded just SO GOOD and I couldn't pass it up! But in my opinion, I think the author will still do very well in the book market despite what I think of her book and I know many people have enjoyed this book far more than I did, so in saying that I truly do admire the author for bringing that hype because I know she'll do very well with that and her future books. She certainly does have the talent!

But for me personally, I think what let this book down - at least for me - was that it read almost like a history textbook or something along those lines (like the powers and the whole society thing are labelled this name and belong to this category and such) and also the length of the book was rather too long and rather too slow for me to get into the actual storyline. So I guess to put it simply, the whole book was just too complicated for my taste to understand and that alone made me not care about the rest of the story nor its characters, which again is a shame because I really tried hard to like this book and sadly it didn't work out for me.

On a positive note however, I do applaud the creativity of the author for creating such a world (which is why I'm giving this book two stars) and I can see why certain people have loved this book for such creativity. It's interesting and unique in its own way, and ultimately is different compared to some books I have read in the past. Now as for whether this book is going to be a seven book series or not, I'm not sure how far the author will go with that because I think three books will do that just fine, but again, I wish for the best for the author because she'll go far from what I'm seen in this book, even though I wasn't a huge fan of this book.

Overall, THE BONE SEASON may have been a huge disappointment for me and that's because I skimmed the rest of the book from the half-way point (which is such a shame too), but in the end of it all, I still think the author is quite talented and anyone who likes a different take of the paranormal genre will definitely come to love this book!

The Rating

2/5 stars