Book Review :: The Bone Season, by Samantha Shannon

The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon
ISBN: 1620401398
Series: The Bone Season #1
Published by Bloomsbury
on August 20th 2013
Genres: Fantasy, Young Adult
Pages: 452
Goodreads

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.

Last updated on 6 April 2022

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What is The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon about?

The Bone Season follows 19-year-old Paige. She lives Scion London, a criminal underground full of clairvoyants who have been outcast by the Amourotics (or ‘normal’ people). She is one of the only dreamwalkers around.

Paige’s job is to hunt out information by breaking in people’s minds for her boss, Jaxon Hall. Then one day, her life changes completely. Paige is attacked on the underground, kidnapped and taken off to Oxford, a city that has been kept hidden and secret for 2 hundred years, where, much to her horror, she discovers that they are not alone.

“Knowledge is dangerous. Once you know something, you can’t get rid of it. You have to carry it. Always.”

The Rephaim, otherworldly creatures, have been living there, and Paige is taken under the not-so-protective wing of the Warden. He is her enemy, but also her master and trainer. Warden trains Paige and helps her with her gifts, all while she is plotting and scheming ways to escape and get back to the Seven Seals.

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My thoughts on The Bone Season

This book has been sitting on my shelf for a long while now, and I finally got around to reading it. The Bone Season was deemed to be the new Harry Potter, Shannon being compared to J.K. Rowling.

I didn’t really realise this until after I had read it, though, because I didn’t know about it until this year (it came out in 2013). It didn’t feel like HP or reading something even remotely similar to Rowling’s magical stories, but I can see how people think that. The special protagonist, the hidden societies in the ‘normal’ or Muggle world, the mystical creatures, the magical sense about the place, etc etc. But I think it was so different to HP that it shouldn’t really be compared to it or even put in the same box.

“There was no normal. There never had been. “Normal” and “natural” were the biggest lies we’d ever created.”

Word on the internet is that it was going to be like YA for adults. The ‘new adult’ genre apparently is picking up, and I think that this is definitely in the category. Paige was in her late teens, but acted like an adult, for the most part, and the other characters were a little older than her (not including the ones who were several hundred years old, of course), and the storyline was more adult than the usual YA that hits our shelves.

It was dystopian, but also fantasy and a bit science-fiction-y too, and I really liked Paige as the main character. She was strong and outspoken, and pretty kick-ass at the same time. Yet as the book went on you realised her soft spots and that made her more human, or more likeable. While Warden was supposed to be the bad guy, I liked him immediately. I don’t know what it was about him, but I think Shannon wrote him wonderfully.

There was a bit of info-dumping, but I think that in an elaborate world such as the one that Shannon has created, then sometimes that is necessary. It was such an intricate world too, full of layers upon layers of details and while there were moments it was a little hard to keep up with all the little bits and pieces, it was still a great story and a great read. I’ve heard this is the first of 7 books. I will definitely be reading them. The second book in this series is called The Mime Order, and it’s out now.

 What about you? Have you read The Bone Season?