The Bone Season – Samantha Shannon – Book Review

Goodreads blurb: The year is 2059. Nineteen-year-old Paige Mahoney is working in the criminal underworld of Scion London, based at Seven Dials, employed by a man named Jaxon Hall. Her job: to scout for information by breaking into people’s minds. For Paige is a dreamwalker, a clairvoyant and, in the world of Scion, she commits treason simply by breathing.

It is raining the day her life changes for ever. Attacked, drugged and kidnapped, Paige is transported to Oxford – a city kept secret for two hundred years, controlled by a powerful, otherworldly race. Paige is assigned to Warden, a Rephaite with mysterious motives. He is her master. Her trainer. Her natural enemy. But if Paige wants to regain her freedom she must allow herself to be nurtured in this prison where she is meant to die.

The Bone Season introduces a compelling heroine and also introduces an extraordinary young writer, with huge ambition and a teeming imagination. Samantha Shannon has created a bold new reality in this riveting debut.

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Although I haven’t read too many books in the fantasy fiction genre, I have read enough to know a really good book from an ‘also-ran’ one, and trust me when I say this, The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon is one of the really good books in this genre, and marks the first book of what promises to be a wonderfully written series in this genre.

As the blurb states, this book is set in a dystopian London of the future where in the world of Scion, clairvoyants like Paige Mahoney are treated like the enemy and jailed like criminals. But Paige is not like any of the other voyants, she has gifts that are unlike powers that other voyants and ‘unnaturals’ have, she is far more powerful than most of them, but she doesn’t quite realize it.

It is only when she is imprisoned and sent to Oxford that she slowly begins to realize the full strength of her powers. While her relationship with her keeper, The Warden, a member of the Rephaites is strained at best, the fact that he tolerates her tantrums and outright rebellious behavior is something that strikes her as odd. The simmering tension between Paige and the Warden makes for the more interesting portions of this book, and what their relationship finally develops into as part of the gradual journey this book takes us on makes for lovely reading.

At the heart of it, this narrative is, in my opinion, as much a ‘coming of age’ story of Paige as it is of how she emerges the ‘most unlikely hero’ of the masses and how she harnesses her immense power for the greater good of the masses.

With Scion, the citadel and Oxford, the author creates what probably is the best dystopian future that I have read about in quite a while now. And with the various types of voyants, Rephaites, and other species mentioned in the narrative, she ups the ante in this wonderful first book. Given the fact that this is the debut book of this author, it speaks volumes for her ability to engage with her readers and immerse them in her world of Scion and Oxford.

Gotta go now as I am ready to jump straight into The Mime Order, the second book in this series.

Click here to purchase The Bone Season from Flipkart [Link] or Amazon [Link].

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A review copy of this book was provided to me by the publishers in return for an honest and unbiased review of the same.