I had been putting this off for a few years. I don't know why. I'm kind of kicking myself for it. I may have given this 5 stars if I read it years ago.

I ended up flying through this. Not wanting to put it down. After splitting this book into sections for each day I would get to the end of a section and want to carry on reading. It's why I managed to finish this in 3 days.

The world itself was more complex than I expected. As the book goes on more is explained and I could figure things out. I imagine I will learn more in book two.

The romance isn't a main focus, which I was glad about. But it felt not insta love but kinda. If that makes sense. Enemy to lover in a way. But maybe because I like Warden it didn't bother me too much.


Paige is definitely a 'chosen one' trope. But that doesn't bother me here. She comes across pretty likable so far. I'm not sure if that will stay being the case or not.

The story itself may not be the most unique story I've ever read but I did love it. I was captivated pretty much straight away. I'm left wanting to pick up book two ASAP.

Obviously this is only a very brief excerpt but seemed like a fantastic build up and premise to Samantha Shannon's series. It seems like a very unique world with lots of voyants and magical elements. I'd definitely love to read this series at some point and it's now on my TBR pile!

I felt that I should like this because it ticks so many of the boxes of things I like. And I probably should have given it a higher rating, but I had a sample rather than the whole book. This almost certainly affected my enjoyment, because there was an abundance of world-building in the sample.
Some authors manage world-building whilst creating an interesting story. Unfortunately, I spent so much time trying to understand the background, that I felt it detracted from the story itself.

Great start to a series. Really look forward to reading all the books in this series by Samantha Shannon.

This book I’ve been wanting to read for a while and when I got an ARC of it, I was really excited about a new fantasy book. It took a while for me to get to it but I had the second book in the series and really wanted to read this book first. Unfortunately, it wasn’t what I hoped.

In this book, Paige is a clairvoyant, a dreamwalker to be exact, and her existence is pretty much illegal in Scion London where she lives and she works in the criminal underworld of the city. During the course of the book, she is trapped somewhere much worse than Scion London and learns about a hidden layer of her world underneath everything she knew before. Along the way, she learns more about her world, her powers, the people around her and her past as well.

Paige’s world is intricate with meanings and details laced through everything, as we learn more about what is going on through Paige’s eyes. The flashbacks were useful at times and annoying at others, as they disrupted the flow of the story to give information that wasn’t needed right then, or could be summed up in a line or two. Samantha Shannon didn’t tell, she showed but I feel like the showing went a little overboard and it slowed the pace of the book right down. Many parts of the book dragged as it tried to introduce us to the setting, the main character’s background and the plot at the same time and it was a lot of information all in one go. I feel like I would have liked the world a lot more if I hadn’t had to try and remember what was going on with who. There were far too many characters and plot threads by the end of the book and in doing so, me caring about them was split between them until I found it hard to care about anything that was going on, including the main character.

Paige as a main character was a little on the bland side but I liked her well enough, at least enough that I wanted her to escape and survive. I liked how she explored her new circumstances and how the fear of being killed wrestled with her want to be free and I really liked how she looked at the other people she was imprisoned with. She feels very young at times and old at others and this was an interesting facet of her character.

But my big problem with this book was the love interest. The relationship between him and Paige creeped me out but since it only came up near the end of the book, I could deal with it. I couldn’t deal with the fact that we’re supposed to sympathise with him as he owns Paige. We’re supposed to think he’s nice because he lets Paige sleep in a bed, walk outside the building and eat sometimes when that was just the bare minimum of what he should do for her. Yes, the plot meant that he couldn’t show anything for her outwardly but his need to hide everything from Paige irritated me greatly. And when he justified invading her dreams and memories because she wouldn’t trust him, any chance of me liking him was out the window.

Despite this being an epic fantasy book that intrigued me with its summary, this book just wasn’t for me. 2 stars!

Unfortunately I couldn't get into this. I tried really hard but 50 pages in the plot was too uninteresting to carry on.

I received a copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

Upon opening this, I was immediately drawn to the ink drawing of SciLo or Scion London and various cohorts that the forbidden clairvoyants inhabit.

On reading I loved the description of how London keeps its dark historical undertones, and invites us into the criminal world that our protagonist describes.
I was however, disappointed to discover that I hadn't been given the entire book but only a single chapter. I was left curious and wanting to discover what was going to happen next. What the consequences were going to be for the two dead underlords and the voyant on the train.

So far I am in love with this book and I will most definitely be purchasing this asap.

I missed my chance at reading this arc, however, I was so intrigued by the premise I’ve since bought the entire series and I’m excited to get into it! Thanks so much for the arc!

This book sounds interesting. I will definitely give it a try when I get some time. However, an excerpt isn't really enough to give an informed review, which is why I've given it 3 stars for the time being until I read the whole book.

A book with a slow start but a very quick and thrilling end.
This book lacked generating interest in me at the start but as it progressed it became difficult to put it down. A new realm of fantasy is explored in this book and it is really difficult to understand what is happening at the start and needs a careful read to understand it all.

I received a preview copy of the bone season and have since bought the full novel so will be continuing to read on.

Characters

Paige
What I love about the development of Paige is the fact that nothing is made of her gender. There are comments of strength and weakness, but they are never in relation to her being female.
She is flawed, as the best heroes always are. Paige is our eyes into the world in which Clairvoyance has been declared illegal. She’s strong willed, moral (to a point) and selfless.

I love her and I can’t wait to delve into the sequels. At no point did I wish I could see the efforts of Jax, Nick et al once Paige had been taken. I felt like I was supporting her, just by being there. She had me hooked from the start and I will never leave Paige’s side so long as Shannon keeps writing.

Warden
Warden started life in my mind as a younger love child of Alan Rickman and David Warner. If I’m honest, he still remained that way, he just got younger as the book progressed. With an air of mystery, I wasn’t quite sure of him even as I closed the book.
However, his motives did seem clear as I came to the final act. Without spoiling them all I can say is Shannon excels in drip feeding believable hints that make the ending believable.
He’s someone I craved to see more and more throughout the book. I wanted him to be someone a little more than he seemed; Shannon does not disappoint.

Story

The story is artfully woven, throwing the reading readily into the world of seclusion, mythology and resentment. While there are action sequences, Shannon takes her time in building up relationships between characters.
Using whole chapters to delve into Paige’s past could, in other writer’s hands, seem clunky. However, Shannon develops these scenes and doesn’t allow the narrative to lose its flow while reading. Once you have finished the book, you will see how clever and creative these additions are to the story. Not only in terms of character, but to the plot and world building as well.
The story hints at a literary universe that will be with us for many years. Paige is for those of us who have needed something a little bit more substantial than the dystopian trilogies on offer. This story has given us enough questions to run for a series of books and perhaps be compared to that of Harry Potter and Cassandra Clare in terms of scope.
The most important aspect of this story is that it gives you a satisfying ending while leaving you with questions.

Writing

Part way through I text a friend and recommended this book to her. She loves The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothuss. I will have to relent and say this writing is better for me. The styles are similar, but Shannon is much more concise and flowing. As much as I love Rothuss myself, I have to read his work in chunks. The Bone Season would have been read in one sitting had I not been attacked by unrelenting conversations of my father.
For a story set in the future, I’m so happy that the writing still brought in an element of an old world. It drew itself back into nature. At least it did for me.
I would put this alongside Lani Taylor’s Daughter of… series too. The writing, like Lani’s, is griping, gritty and pure. It takes you to another world; something many writers would love to achieve and here is Shannon, doing so with an organic ease.

I’m very much looking forward to getting back to London so I can purchase the next two books available. I’m even ignoring my distress at having to buy the third in hardback.

I received the first chapter in this book from Netgalley. It was almost too short! As soon as the chapter ended I wanted to keep reading. It sucked me right in and before I knew it, it was over. The author built the beginnings of a marvellous plot and world in the first chapter. The idea was fresh and new, not something I've ever seen before. I really enjoyed what I did read and would purchase this book for myself and recommend for friends.

I'll admit that I didn't end up reading this on Netgalley, as I heard the author was doing an appearance near to where I live, and decided to just purchase the book instead. I love this world, and I found it was a very interesting blend of 'science' and magic to create a new story around often over-used magical beings in YA fiction. I thought the characters were all well-developed, and I found myself racing through the action scenes. The only problem I had with The Bone Season was the amount of tech and magic jargon that was thrown at the reader from the very first page. Shannon sometimes explains the meaning behind certain words, but the different branches of magic and things like that go largely unexplained, making it very difficult to follow. There's a handy guide at the start to help identify them, but then Shannon uses different words from the handy chart and I'm lost again. It did take me a while to get through this-- I actually started it about three times and kept putting it down, but perseverance paid off and now I'm itching to get started with the second book. Would definitely recommend.

In this book, the world building was quite extensive and that alone was already worth at least 4,5 stars. There is even a spin-off called "On the Merits of Unnaturalness" which further explains it.
Although I haven't read the spin-off I could reasonably follow the various 'voyants' classes that appear in the book.
I also liked Paige because, although she was IMO likable, she wasn't exactly a standard romantic heroine. She could be contradictory, seemed to be too cynical and suspicious sometimes and only at the end of the book, you could see all her layers. Perhaps she's not everybody's favorite type of main female character, but I found that really refreshing after so many perfect fictional girls out there. I also liked the flaws in all other characters, I think this contributed to give depth to the story.
I'll be surely following up this series to see how the story goes on.

I found the opening a little confusing at first, but everything quickly fell into place. As soon as I got a grip on Paige's world I was hooked. I already love Paige- she's strong, feisty and wise beyond her years. In just one short chapter, the story is already feeling fresh, fantastical, immersive, complex, intriguing, fast-paced and frankly, scary. I wasn't sure if this book would be for me beforehand but now I'm so excited to read the rest!

Full review will be posted on my blog rachiereads.wordpress.com as well as Goodreads, Tumblr, and Amazon.co.uk on Saturday September 10th.

My thoughts

I was really excited to finally get started on this book because of all the hype that’s been built up around it. I definitely had very very high expectations, and for the first few chapters it seemed all of my dreams had come true. But then…everything is ruined. Paige, the main character and a very powerful clairvoyant, is kidnapped and taken to a secret place for clairvoyants where another race, the Rephaim, are in charge and see the voyants as their slaves. The synopsis for this book is very misleading – it suggests that the story is about Paige hiding her power from her father, and that’s not it at all. In fact, he’s barely in it.

I had a lot of problems with this book, one of them being that slavery is used as a plot device and that, even worse, the slave falls in love with the master. Also, Warden, her master, is about 200 years old and Paige is 19. Why. Why. Why. Their romance is meant to be slow burn, I presume, but there’s nothing between them at all for most of the book until they accidentally become ~magically connected~ and then they decide they never want to be separated? Or something? I don’t even know.

The captured clairvoyants are stripped of their names and identities and given uniforms, and they are forced through training and tests of bravery and skill to prove that they are worthy of becoming “red jackets”. I might have been intrigued by the idea of training clairvoyants if it had actually happened in the book more than once. The entire middle section of the book revolved around Paige making friends in the camp who turn out to be completely irrelevant later on, and the whole book just d r a g s o n. There’s hardly any story until the last 100 or so pages, and by that point I was completely bored out of my mind and just wanted to finish so I could read something else.

None of the characters in this book have much of a personality. Paige herself is very dull – the only thing I found interesting about her was her power as a dreamwalker. (That’s another thing – it’s so difficult to follow what type of clairvoyants can do what, because it’s hardly explained at all.) Warden is about as exciting as a cardboard box and all he seems to do is say cryptic things to annoy Paige and then decide he loves her. Jaxon Hall is an awful character – he’s manipulative and sadistic and controlling and he views his employees as his possessions. Unfortunately Paige doesn’t realise this until the end of the book. Nashira and the other Rephs are meant to be evil but they’re boring and don’t do much. The other clairvoyants that Paige works with could have been so interesting to learn about, because they all have different abilities and backgrounds, but we never find out anything about them other than what we need to know for Paige’s story to make sense. Nick was a great character BUT his story infuriated me – at one point we find out that Paige is in love with him, and then it is revealed that he’s gay JUST to set up for Paige’s bitter disappointment and the development of her storyline. STOP USING QUEER SIDE CHARACTERS AS PLOT DEVICES JUST TO FURTHER THE PROTAGONIST’S STORY.

This book is so frustrating because Samantha Shannon set up this incredibly interesting, intricate world set in future London (known as Scion London, or SciLo), filled with crime and darkness and paranormal activity, and then she ripped it away from me and gave me a dull compound with a few buildings and a field. Y tho. I would love to read an entire book set just in London, and maybe that’s what the next few books are about, but this book completely depleted my interest in continuing with the series.

There was another aspect of life in Sheol I (the secret compound) that could have been very cool to explore, the Emim – a zombie-like race of creatures that are drawn to Sheol I like a beacon and try to attack every so often. We only encounter a couple of the creatures during the book, and it left me wondering why the author bothered with that plot at all. It serves as a bit of a backstory to why the Rephs are there, but honestly, this book would have been way more exciting if it was just clairvoyants vs. Emim, with no Rephs at all. As it was, the last few chapters ended up feeling like a weird mix of Mockingjay, Divergent, and Harry Potter. The idea of a “resistance” comes out of nowhere and I ended up wondering why I spent 300 pages reading Paige’s guilty thoughts about Warden and her dull meetings with irrelevant characters when the story should have been setting up for the big fight/escape. It was just weird.

Sadly this book was a huge disappointment for me after all the hype surrounding it, and I’m pretty sure I won’t be continuing with the series unless the ebook is free on Kindle, or I find it at the library. I won’t be spending any money on it – it’s unoriginal and dull and very very forgettable.

Final thoughts

Rating: 1 star

Recommended for: I really didn’t enjoy this and I would recommend skipping it.

Thank you very much to Netgalley and Bloomsbury Publishing for giving me the opportunity to read a sample chapter of The Bone Season! The book, however, was not for me. The world was introduced too abruptly and with no easing into it. A clairvoyant criminal society seems like an interesting idea, but it didn't translate too well into an interesting world, in my opinion. I also didn't care much for the main character, Paige, or the others, and the language used during both narration and dialogue felt a bit off. I do see many people enjoying this book in other reviews, though, and I love that it's a sci-fi YA with such creative plot! I admire Samantha Shannon's imagination very much. So maybe it wasn't for me but that doesn't mean other readers wouldn't like it!

The first chapter of THE BONE SEASON was a good introduction to the world of the novel, told through the main character's first person POV. The ideas of clairvoyance and the regimented society Shannon created were interesting and I would be intrigued to find out more. However, it was let down by some slightly clunky phrasing and too much exposition. 3/5

The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon is the first book in The Bone Season series. 

Samantha Shannon has created an alternative world in which for 200 years being any form of clairvoyant is illegal with the penalty of death. The UK Government have been telling people that being a clairvoyants is unnatural and it is an illness. 

The Book follows Paige a rare clairvoyant she has the ability for her spirit to leave her body and see into people dreamscape. To stay safe and to find out more about her gift she joined a crime syndicate and moved up the ladder and now is a high member. 

Paige life changes one night when she is caught and taken to a secret location. Paige find out that everything the Government has said is a lie, they send clairvoyant into slavery to a Race called the Rephaim. This is payment for the Rephaims killing creatures from the Aether that feast on Human and animal flesh. Paige keeper is called The Warden the Blood Consort to the Rephaim leader, he has never taken in a human before but Paige is a special case. Now all Paige is to escape from this living hell and on her journey she will have to find out who she can or can not trust, and how strong she really is. 

It's a very scary world that Samantha Shannon, she has turned UK into a country with no free movement. A world that is controlled by fear, manipulation and what people are willing to do to survive. It makes me question if I was in Paige positions how would I cope. 

This book is amazing heart racing book, a story that is muti layer in a vivid world. I never know what was going to happen next, which kept me engaged until the last word. 

Paige is fascinating character, by the end of the book I am so invested in her as a character that my heart broke slightly, with her interaction with the Warden. Paige has been broken down and is building herself back up and I am interested to see what happens in the next book The Mime Order.

This is the first book that I listen too, I did enjoy listening to the book as it helped me with the pronunciation with names and it felt like Paige was telling me her story personally. Although nothing can top the feeling of reading a book in bed. 

This book is for anyone that likes strong female character, a world with magic, a character fighting for their life against a corrupt Government, and the beginning of a revolution that will change the world. 

I give this book 5 out of 5