The Skinny: The Bone Season is enjoyable, if unpolished. Samantha Shannon is a new author who is a little wet behind the ears, but she shows great promise.
I picked up Shannon’s The Bone Season on a whim. The name sounded vaguely familiar, and the plot sounded interesting enough that I decided to give it a shot.
As I left the bookstore, I realized The Bone Season sounded familiar because the book’s author, Samantha Shannon, is being lauded all over the news for her brilliant debut novel.
U.S.A. Today compares The Bone Season to the works of George Orwell and J.R.R. Tolkien. Vanity Fair compares the book to A Clockwork Orange. And everyone is comparing Samantha Shannon to J.K. Rowling.
Let me get something out of the way right now: The Bone Season is none of those things, and Samantha Shannon is no J.K. Rowling. The fact that so many news sources have come to the conclusion that Shannon is some sort of messiah of literature makes me question whether I read the same book as everyone else.
Still, The Bone Season is good enough that I would recommend it to anyone who has money to burn and is looking for a good paranormal story to keep them occupied for a day or two.
The year is 2059, and Paige Mahoney, a young clairvoyant, is working in the criminal underworld of Scion London. One day, Paige is attacked and her life changes forever. Kidnapped and drugged, she finds herself in Oxford — a city kept secret for 200 years, governed by an otherworldly race called the Rephaim who seeks to capture clairvoyants for its own sinister purposes.
Despite a promising be- ginning, the book winds up being predictable and formulaic, but by no means does it ever come off as boring. Still, there are a lot of moments that are frustrating.
Paige finds adjusting to life ruled by extraterrestrial hominids a bit difficult. So she proceeds to break every rule in Oxford, endangering her life and the lives of others for no other reason than “F— your rules, you alien swine.” You’ll find this gets old pretty quickly and wonder if Paige is actually capable of learning or if she’s just instructed to find the cleverest way to get herself killed.
But this isn’t a strange quirk of Paige’s — all of Shannon’s characters come off a bit one-sided and dull, which shows negligence on Shannon’s part. For example, a particular character dies in the middle of the book, and that was really sad. Or at least it should have been sad. Shannon spends a lot of time after the fact trying to make you sad about this character’s death — but we literally only met the poor guy twice, and he didn’t give us too many reasons to care.
Yet Paige is inexplicably distraught about the character throughout the entire book. She will often take breaks in between throwing pies at the aliens’ faces and tying the aliens’ shoestrings together to cry about this minor character for no apparent reason.
Two of the other characters feel like they’re supposed to function as Paige’s Ron and Hermione, but even after hundreds of pages, I didn’t really find myself caring about either of them, even when the Hermione character was close to death.
All of this is really a shame, because Shannon introduces the characters in a way that makes you want to know more about them — but then she sets these porcelain characters aside for hours only to smash them on the floor at the last minute, expecting you to feel bad about it.
Even though I have a lot of gripes with the book’s characters, the book shines in other areas. The main plot is a cookie-cutter “Single hero leads a revolution against oppressive rulers” bit, but the supernatural elements Shannon throws into the mix are enough to keep the world feeling fresh. You’ll find yourself fascinated by all the different powers clairvoyants have, and you’ll want to know more about what has happened to the world, and about Paige’s former life as the assistant to a criminal mastermind.
Shannon does well in creating a world you want to know more about, but her plot and characters fall flat, and the book comes off as a bland but hearty adventure. It’s a really good read, especially for a new author, but Shannon needs to spend more time crafting her characters and giving them the attention they deserve.
Despite all the praise being showered on Shannon, she has not done anything miraculous for the world of paranormal fiction — yet. But that’s all to be expected. After all, Shannon is a new author fresh out of college. Though The Bone Season was nothing special, Shannon shows great promise and I will gladly buy the next book in this planned seven-part series.
But if the second book is just more of the same, I’m jumping ship.
