Nocturnal Book Reviews

The Bone Season is freaking gorgeous, ladies and gents. I can safely and with great pleasure say that my appetite for YA dystopia is now restored.

Samantha Shannon has this absolutely wonderful and carefully crafted, believable vision of the world Paige lives in, not only because this world had a chance to develop within 200 years but because it's a living, breathing and teaming with emotions mechanism.

However it's the strength of its characters which captivates our hearts.

Scion is England which 200 years ago started killing off its clairvoyants, and by mid-twenty first century this big dictatorial machine runs well and runs very smoothly. Clairvoyants and detected early on and given a death penalty, the other two choices are to join the machine and work on catching their own kind or go deep underground and work for the criminal families of London.

Paige at the age of sixteen chose the latter. She works for one of the biggest criminal lords of the city, - Jax, by invading the dreamscapes of people he wants to watch. She is one of the rarest types of voyants - a dreamwalker.

When she is snatched after seemingly random stop-check on the train, she finds out that very few voyants actually die at the hands of Scion. Instead they are transported into a super-secret penal colony in Oxford, - Sheol I and given into the hands of cruel, alien, aetheric creatures Rephaim who craft them into fighters and general cannon fodder against creatures of darkness who feed on aether and human flesh.

Paige is suspected to be a rare voyant and chosen by the ruler to be trained by her blood-consort, however Paige's Warden has very different plans for her and trains her accordingly...

This book starts pretty slow but as soon as Paige gets into Sheol things pick up and turn into an exhilarating ride. The Rephaites are very sadistic and violent creatures, and there are a lot of brutal scenes in The Bone Season. At the same time, humans are shown in a great variety of characters. The author revels in their resilience and spirit but she also shows the psychology of those who accept their fate and fully cooperate with aliens.

Paige herself is an angry, distrustful and street-savvy fighter, who is very loyal to friends she left behind in London and who keeps her secrets close to her heart.

Warden, her trainer is also shown as a very complex personality, and their constant battle of wills slowly turns into a friendship based on mutual interests, and much later into a spark of something more intimate.

I reveled in this book, folks. It was vibrant, fast-paced and compelling. I strongly recommend it and cannot wait to read the continuation of this marvelous series.