The Bone Season (The Bone Season, #1) in Around the World in 80 Books

Nov 08, 2013 Sarah rated it did not like it

Shelves: young-adult, magic-sci-fi-fantasy, dystopian, audio

Full disclosure: I did not finish this book. But I listened to about 40% of it on audio, and that was enough for me to tell it was time to move on.

Samantha Shannon has been touted as The Next JK Rowling, and I do not think that comparison is fair. True, both women created new, fantastical worlds and my understanding is that The Bone Season will be a 7-book series, but that is where the similarities end. One of the things that worked so well with the wizarding world Rowling created is that it is ...more

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Jan 27, 2015 Nadine in NY Jones rated it it was ok

Shelves: young-adult, fantasy-and-sci-fi, aliens, paranormal, dystopian-and-post-apocalyptic, cotton-candy, genre-blender, alternate-planes-and-histories

Cotton candy, with a generous side of info dump. The basic story was predictable, but fun. However, that's overshadowed by the amount of exposition that the reader must slog through early on. Additionally, many things don't make sense, the passage of time is completely confused, there are too many extraneous characters that I couldn't keep track of, and the real meat of the plot - the actual planning of the rebellion - takes place off stage. On the whole, this book feels really sloppy.

I thought ...more

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Apr 15, 2017 Rebecca rated it did not like it

Shelves: dnf

Why was this popular? Ugh. I had to stop halfway through the book, because I kept thinking, "So this is a paranormal romance. I'd rather be reading a Charley Davidson book." ... which was a series that I wasn't even planning to finish. ...more

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Aug 26, 2013 Sam rated it it was ok

Shelves: read-2013, young-person-protag, reviewed, 8-fantasy-scifi

The Bone Season is not a well-written book. At all. Readers drown in a sea of so much stilted writing that we’re grateful when we can surface from this massive awfulness and only have to wade through the merely pedestrian and embarrassingly simple, 8-year-old-level writing. But even those interludes of mediocre writing are tiny slivers of relief before we’re submerged under more embarrassment. And, mind you, the book is marketed as adult fiction, not YA.

So, it’ll come as no surprise to you that The Bone Season is not a well-written book. At all. Readers drown in a sea of so much stilted writing that we’re grateful when we can surface from this massive awfulness and only have to wade through the merely pedestrian and embarrassingly simple, 8-year-old-level writing. But even those interludes of mediocre writing are tiny slivers of relief before we’re submerged under more embarrassment. And, mind you, the book is marketed as adult fiction, not YA.

So, it’ll come as no surprise to you that characterization is also one-dimensional. Our protagonist isn’t just a regular clairvoyant; she’s the super-duper, most special kind. She’s feisty and stubborn, many times making foolish decisions to her own detriment in her quest to escape the penal colony where she and other ‘voyants’ are trapped. It doesn’t matter that often times her actions get her and her friends into danger or that they don’t make sense and have no purpose aside from reminding us that she is FEISTY AND STUBBORN AND SPECIAL. Her keeper is part of the population of otherworldly Rephaims keeping the voyants imprisoned. He is cold and mysterious and has some secret past. How do we know? Because he speaks in riddles and doesn’t answer our protagonist’s questions and…well, isn’t that enough??

All of this might be forgiven if the action was gripping enough. I read genre books, so I get that sometimes plot and action take priority over all else. But good lord, the writing should still be competent enough to not get in the way of enjoying the action. And besides, the story’s action was so plodding that it could not distract from or compensate for the other weaknesses. There’s a whole lot of info dumping going on where we just get stretches and stretches of explanation about this new world, instead of getting to see things unfold as, you know, A STORY.

With all that being said, though, the book does hint at a potentially well-imagined world, and it’s the novelty of it that got me to read to the end and to give it a rather generous two-star rating. But this comes from someone who does not often read the dystopia or fantasy genres; for those who do, I’m willing to bet that it flogs the same ol’ tropes you’re all familiar with, in which case, there’s no reason to suffer through a badly-written one when there are likely better ones to check out. The book is supposedly the first of a planned seven-book series, but unless subsequent installments are a billion times improved from this one, I think my quota of “has-potentially-good-idea-even-though-it-has-crap-writing” books has been exhausted.

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