The Bone Season

Full review on Reader's Dialogue: readersdialogue.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-bone-season.html

What an absolutely gripping book. Paige is a great heroine. She's courageous - sometimes to a fault - and she's smart, and loyal - mostly. She fights hard to free the clairvoyants, and she winds up leading the revolution. I found it a little odd that she fights so hard to get out of Oxford and back to the citadel when she's confronted with so many new horrifying revelations about what's really going on, when she knows that there's so much more that she doesn't understand, that the Rephaim have plans that reach down back centuries and forward to the end of the world, but she doesn't really try to figure out what the Rephaim are really all about. But at the same time, I love that. Because instead of the typical heroine, who is full of self-sacrifice in order to save humanity, Paige just desperately wants the chance to live as normal a life as possible, to get back to the world she knows, even if she now knows it's nothing like what she thought it was. By the end of the book, though, she's turned around and though she doesn't uncover anything really revealing in this book, I'm sure she's going to start uncovering things in the next book. (And if not, there are six more books for her to do that!) Even though the mysteries stay hidden, this book is far from slow-paced. Things happen one after the next, people and Rephaim seem one thing and on the next page seem the other, traitors and misplaced loyalties abound.

And the secondary characters are so so good. Lissa and Seb especially stole my heart, and I cried when Seb died, even though I barely knew him at that point. And when he comes up again later, I cried buckets. I think it's because I felt everything through Paige, and she feels so strongly about everything. She's always passionate in whatever emotion she feels - passionate hate, passionate love, passionate fear, passionate sorrow. It makes her reckless, but since she somehow manages to get out of (almost) every scrape, her blazing passion propels her forward to every next step, and her passion for the others in the prison, especially the amaurotics and harlies, makes me love her as fiercely as she loves them.

Paige's group from back in the citadel is satisfyingly hard to pin down. They're her family, but she doesn't particularly like all of them. I loved seeing her unrequited feelings for Nick, though, because it gives her that vulnerability she seems not to have. And then there's her relationship with Warden. As maddeningly confusing as Warden is himself, and completely unsatisfying in how it's left at the end of the book. Which of course means that aside from wanting the next book for the secrets it will reveal, I want to know what happens to Warden, and what happens to Warden and Paige.

So. We've had the Twilight Saga and endless reheatings of same. Teenagers who learned to love reading from Harry Potter have had to gorge themselves on dystopian-and-possibly-paranormal romance after paranormal-and-possibly-dystopian romance since then. Hollywood took a masterpiece like World War Z and turned it into an Apocalypse Yawn movie everybody had seen a dozen times before. It was all leading up to this book.

OK, that's a little overboard. But: this 20-year-old (ish, when she started writingBone Season) Oxford student looked upon these works and saw that they were without form, and void, and often sucky, and mostly unoriginal. And yet there was something attractive, exciting and even edifying hidden underneath the chintzy Divergent/Aberrant/Enclave/Matched/Maze Runner/Number Four/5th Wave/Eleventh Plague wallpaper, a story our culture wants to hear today.

That story is about a young, potential-filled main character struggling to survive some combination of conditions we literally can't understand, because they only exist in fiction, and ones we understand all too well, such as a suffocating security state, or remote and uninvolved parents, or unrequited love, or whatever. The character learns there are more people like her than she realized, suffering many of the same indignities, and feeling just as hopeless. Learning that and thereby learning more about herself, she discovers that she has strength heretofore untapped; depths, you might say, unplumbed; enough to make a dent in the awful world that squanders her and her peers' potential, if she's courageous enough to try. Look at it from 50,000 feet and it's a story about hope in the face of overwhelming obstacles, and that would be why today's readers dig it so much.

The Bone Season is the first of a projected seven-book series, set in an alternate world (circa 2059) where clairvoyance -- many, many different strains of clairvoyance, as it turns out -- has become a fact of life for a small but significant percentage of the population. This "unnaturalness" is aggressively and routinely purged from the population of the "London Citadel," Britain being one of nine European countries under the thumb of an ubergovernment called Scion, which rose to power in response to the clairvoyant menace. Clairvoyants powerful and clever enough to avoid this fate secret themselves into one of a number of "mime-crime" syndicates, the bosses offering protection from discovery and euthanasia in exchange for criminal service. Our main character is a special kind of clairvoyant (remember, strength untapped and depth unplumbed) whose career in one of the crime syndicates is cut short when she is discovered by something quite a bit worse than Scion. (Bonus: It's supernatural!)

What follows is an absorbing, ass-kicking story wherein our Paige Mahoney discovers her strength, reorders her priorities and attempts feats of heroism the two-bit gang member "Pale Dreamer" would never have imagined herself attempting. We learn about Paige faster than she does, and this is the novel's greatest strength. We understand who Paige is and what she has to do -- what she will do, invested as we are in her story -- even as she remains stubborn, and resists change, and tries to avoid responsibility. (Paige is the book's first-person narrator.) There's a lot of showing-not-telling going on in this book, and it's marvelous. Everything Paige does flows from who she is, and even when we readers can see she's being obstinate and self-destructive and merely delaying the inevitable, we're never rolling our eyes and wondering what's taking her so long to wise up. She'll get there, but it won't be because she has an artificial epiphany in Chapter 12 that drives us toward the novel's formulaic ending. (There isn't one of those, to be clear.) Paige is an indelible character. You'll love her.

The novel avoids dropping false choices in front of Paige, ham-fisted turns of events that force her one way or the other. We believe in her just like and to the same extent as her co-MC does, and are just as patient waiting for her to come around. There is nothing about Bone Season that feels artificially manipulated, or manipulative. At the end there is triumph (to a degree), cut with loss and heartbreak, and when you hear a character explain that if we never see him again it's because everything is great and if we do, it's because everything's gone to shit, we root for everything to go to shit, because we want the next book to be as good as this one, and to spend more time with Paige and the other characters we've come to know.

The Bone Season is Samantha Shannon’s debut novel, one of a planned seven to be rolled out by Bloomsbury. It launches today with much fanfare, and a push from Bloomsbury to be the next Twilight or Hunger games. Imaginarium Studios have obtained the film rights, so it seems there’s a considerable effort being put behind Ms Shannon.

The Bone Season is an alternate history dystopia that has that wonderful gloomy English tone. An oppressive and moralistic government with religious trappings (the reader assumes it’s Christian) attempts to track down and imprison rogue or free Voyants (any number of different types of people who can manipulate/talk to spirits). Various criminal syndicates exploit these free voyants while keeping them out of the government’s way.

Our protagonist Paige Mahoney, an Irish immigrant, is working for one of these syndicates until she is captured and taken to the government's holding facility. There begins an unravelling of the truth, the real workings behind the curtain the state has erected.

Imagine Orwell’s 1984, cut with some of the dark fantasy from Storm Constantine’s Stalking Tender Prey but without the sex and you come close.

I wanted to like The Bone Season with as much vigour as Andy Serkis, who blurbs the back of my paperback copy calling it, “Truly Extraordinary and Thrilling”. I prefer my dark fantasy to have that gloomy, cynical edge that British writers seem to evoke naturally and I do love a good gritty dystopia. Sadly I didn’t find it thrilling or extraordinary and if I had to choose between The Bone Season and Twilight I think the later edges out the winner, at least in terms of telling a compelling story.

Despite being written in first person I never felt drawn into the character of Paige, never felt that she was truly in danger or that she was going to lose anything of value. She does lose friends and acquaintances, she is put in mortal danger but I wasn’t immersed enough to care. I do wonder if the knowledge that there are six books to come undercuts some of the tension.

I also found some of the world building got in the way. Any time a new type of Voyant is revealed in the text we get to know if they are an Astragalomanceror, a Chiromancer or an [insert]-omancer and my reading brain just skips over the word when I read it, because mostly its not relevant to the story. I’m also not sure if the flashbacks, that added depth to Paige’s character, didn’t actually break the flow of the story.

It’s not all doom and gloom though, Shannon can write and there were places in the novel which glided effortlessly by. Overall it was a middle of the road read for me, entertaining enough not to skip pages with some niggling bits and pieces that might just be my personal taste.

Is it the next Twilight or Hunger Games? Time will tell.

This book was provided by the publisher.

This review was originally posted on Adventures of a Bookonaut

The year is 2059. Clairvoyance is a crime. Those with the gift have three options; hide their voyance and try to live a normal life, turn themselves in to Scion and join the NVD hunting down their kind or turn to a life of crime with the mime-lords. Paige chose crime, now the favoured mollisher of Seven Seals, she uses her ability to effect the aether to benefit Jaxxon Hall, risking her life each time she does a job. Until one night everything changes.

Wow, where to begin? The Bone Season is the best urban fantasy of the year for me. Set in the future with an alternate past, so much planning has gone into this book and the world building is so well done. There’s never any feeling of info-dump and the history is woven into the characters’ stories. The monarchy was disbanded after King Edward VII went mad and Scion took over to control the voyant problem. It’s a cover story that may or may not have truth to it (really I would read a novel with just the backstory it’s so good) and Paige soon learns where Scion got their ideas from. There’s a place worse than the Tower where the voyants get taken.

Paige and many of the supporting characters have tough choices to make. There isn’t a black and white good or evil choice for them. I didn’t have a single eye rolly moment over what Paige does, she’s not stupid or thoughtless. But the home she is desperate to get back to isn’t all sunshine and puppies either. She doesn’t feel good about killing and she is caring; one act of compassion sets her on her way.

If you’re struggling with the terms at the start, there is a glossary in the back, but it all comes together quickly and most the voyant types have slang names which are descriptive of their powers. They can all use the aether to affect the spirit world, so there are ghosts but also other powers of the mind going on. I’ve not read anything quite like it before and it’s brilliant.

I won’t go into details on the Rephaim but what a fantastic creation. It’s so easy to pluck an existing supernatural creature out of your mind and use them but instead Samantha Shannon has given us a fearsome new foe. And the way they segregate the humans, marking out their status by colour, is something many have done throughout history. Turn them against each other and you don’t have to do the work yourself. But it's the interaction between Paige and her keeper, Warden, that really makes this book.

Apparently there are seven books planned and I cannot wait for more. It’s slightly depressing that the author is a mere 22 and has written such an accomplished debut. What was I doing at that age? If you like urban fantasy at all, please read this, you won’t regret it.