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The Bone Season (The Bone Season, #1)

Samantha Shannon

Start date: May 22, 2014

Finish date: May 31, 2014

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What Members Thought

Mar 19, 2023 Tien rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: young-adult, subdue-the-shelf, mm-23

I am vibrating with suspense. The tension in this book was so elastic; constantly being compressed and stretched. The push and pull between the protagonist and her master or keeper or mentor or whoever he's supposed to be give me the shakes.

Paige Mahoney's will to survive is phenomenal. So is her compassion. In some circumstance, these two instincts conflict. She's been alone for nearly all her life and as thought she'd found her family, she was taken out of that life and into something truly al ...more

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May 14, 2018 Vicky rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: series-in-progress, dystopia, setting-england, own-audible-library, own-calibre-library, zz-cover-color-blue, own-ncc-overdrive-ebook, z-author-europe-north-british

3.5 Stars.

When I finished this book on Friday night, I wanted to start the next book immediately. The last 15% of this book was so action-packed and it's had a bittersweet (though not overly steep) cliffhanger. I ended up not. I was definitely riding a high from the action, but after thinking about the fact that I didn't love 85% of this book and that there are 4 books unpublished with the last one expected in 2021, I just couldn't encourage myself to keep reading. I own The Mime Season, so I'm 3.5 Stars.

When I finished this book on Friday night, I wanted to start the next book immediately. The last 15% of this book was so action-packed and it's had a bittersweet (though not overly steep) cliffhanger. I ended up not. I was definitely riding a high from the action, but after thinking about the fact that I didn't love 85% of this book and that there are 4 books unpublished with the last one expected in 2021, I just couldn't encourage myself to keep reading. I own The Mime Season, so I'm not saying I won't continue eventually, I just couldn't bring myself to do it right now.

My biggest issue with reading this book was that I felt lost almost the entire time. Shannon has created a uniquely complex magic system in Clairvoyance that I loved, but she failed to give us any type of primer to the world before throwing us headfirst into it. She tosses around varying types of -mancers like we know what they are and it did nothing but confuse me and pull me out of the story. In addition, it seems like many of the constructs of her world have multiple aliases that weren't clearly tied together - it wasn't until late in the book that I realized that red-jackets and bone-grubbers were the same things, and it was in that last 10% that I finally found out what gillies were. It was just an awful lot of information to hold on to.

The pacing wasn't great. Until the last 3 (of 15) hours, it was easy for me to put down and even easier for me to be apathetic about. When it came to downtime and the choice between browsing Instagram or reading The Bone Season, Instagram won out almost every time.

I didn't love Paige, she talked a big game but didn't seem to be observant of the world around her. There was this weird dichotomy being inside Paige's head in the first person - her inner monologues were hinting towards Warden having more layers than it seemed, but she herself was remaining firmly unconvinced of him being anything more than he was. It just felt weird.

Overall? Kind of underwhelming. Maybe for a rainy day (or a challenge)? ...more

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Aug 20, 2013 Chris rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: series, united-kingdom, fiction, scifi-fantasy-paranormal, audiobook, dystopia

I probably would have liked this book a whole lot more if I hadn't read a lot of other dystopian stories. The problem is that it's almost impossible to read without noting similarities to the others. The main character, Paige, sounds a lot like Tris in the Divergent series. The relationship between Paige and Warden is reminiscent of the one between Yelena and Valek and the Poison Study series. Even the Emim, who gobble up the unwary in the woods, reminded me of the creatures in the Maze Runner. ...more

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