The Bone Season (The Bone Season, #1) in The Reading Challenge Group

Mar 16, 2017 Ivy rated it it was amazing

Shelves: checked-out-from-library

5 stars

Good book. Liked the characters.

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Feb 02, 2014 A B rated it really liked it

Shelves: rereads

Alrighty, I truly enjoyed this book and read through it in several marathon sittings. You know what I mean - where you're so lost in a good book that you don't even realize you've been reading for 5 hours until the sun starts to come up.

However, I can easily understand the criticisms about this book. For starters, note that there's a glossary in the back of the book, which sadly I did not discover until after I was finished. You know, that whole "avoid flipping to the back of the book in case y Alrighty, I truly enjoyed this book and read through it in several marathon sittings. You know what I mean - where you're so lost in a good book that you don't even realize you've been reading for 5 hours until the sun starts to come up.

However, I can easily understand the criticisms about this book. For starters, note that there's a glossary in the back of the book, which sadly I did not discover until after I was finished. You know, that whole "avoid flipping to the back of the book in case you accidentally catch a glimpse of a spoiler". Grrr. I wish I'd discovered the glossary sooner instead of studying the map and clairvoyance hierarchy chart, neither of which are particularly useful to understanding just what the sam hill is going on. Also, ignore those blurbs that describe this book as a cross between Harry Potter and The Hunger Games. Other than a building in which people are training in supernatural arts (Hogwart's), and people are forced to do stuff they don't like (being a Hunger Games tribute), that's it for similarities. I find these blurbs insulting to all three book series.

It took me three separate tries over the course of a couple of months to get past the first 20 pages of this book. Those are 20 pages of the most confusing and boring text put into print. I finally decided to just disregard them and continue on with the book. And I'm glad I did. The book completely changes at about 30 pages in and that's where the good stuff starts. Once the pieces started coming together, I reread the first 20 pages and they made much more sense.

I do not usually read book covers or jackets because too often, they reveal what I consider spoilers. Thus much of the book was a delightful surprise, and perhaps is why I enjoyed it so much. The rest of my ridiculously rambling review and poorly organized review will go into material revealed on the book's jacket.

Paige lives in London in the not-too-distant future. It's not a particularly nice place. What sets it apart is the discovery of clairvoyance, and varying levels of psychic ability in the populations. Psychics like Paige must keep their abilities hidden and work secretly for underground crime rings. If caught, they are imprisoned and even executed. Oh, and there are poltergeists. Cool, eh? Well, don't get too attached and don't expect to learn too much, because Paige gets captured right about 30 pages in and transported to a horrible sort of prison for psychics run by - wait for it - aliens.

Turns out psychics are essential to protecting the earth from a race of deadly parasites. The aliens (I'm not sure what else to call them) train gifted humans as conscripted soldiers. And by "training" I mean starve, abuse, beat, torture, and kill them. Psychics who do not pass the training and the occasional regular human unfortunate enough to be collected are enslaved as buskers and domestics.

Paige hits the jackpot with her keeper, Warden. He's nice and treats her as kindly as he can. And he's insanely good-looking. He even looks away when she sneaks off to try to help less fortunate slaves in the compound. It's a horrible but mesmerizing premise.

What's problematic are the lack of descriptions and prevalence of nonsensical plot devices. All we know about Warden and the other aliens are that they're attractive. That's it. How am I supposed to picture them? There are no descriptions of their homeland. There is also very little about clairvoyance and what is presented is difficult to understand, and pretty much zilch about the crime rings.

The nonsensical plot devices lie primarily with the relationships between the slaves and their keepers. If psychic humans are so important, why do the keepers basically throw them away? What's the point of not feeding them and denying them something as small as an aspirin, other than to establish that the forced slavery is bad? And why round up humans and keep them in a queue for 10 years before shipping them off to the compound? Paige is lucky to be captured right at the end of the 10 years, but her new friends were not so lucky. Wouldn't it be better to put them to use instead of keeping them locked up for 9 years, waiting for the next Bone Season?

The book would work better if the reader were permitted to spend more time in Scion London and hang out with Paige and the Seven Dials for a while, and then sent to Sheol I. The action in the last third of the book would have been better suited for a sequel. In fact, this book could have been split into a trilogy with better results.

But dash it all, I still loved it. Looking forward to the rest of this intriguing series.
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