After reading and enjoying 'The Priory Of The Orange Tree' and the prequel novella to this series, 'The Pale Dreamer', I decided to pick up Samantha Shannon's debut book 'The Bone Season', the first of a planned seven book series. And I found it to be an enjoyable and engrossing read.
Nineteen year old Paige Mahoney, is a clairvoyant working for the Seven Seals, a criminal syndicate in an alternate near future London, where clairvoyance is a crime - referred to as mime-crime - and punishable by death. Her life however changes for ever when she's attacked, kidnapped and drugged whilst on a trip to visit her father. When she awakes, she finds herself in Oxford, a city that has been hidden, thought destroyed, for two centuries and is controlled by the Rephaim, a vampiric otherworldly race that feed off the auras of clairvoyants. As part of her imprisonment, Paige is assigned to Warden, an enigmatic high ranking Rephaim with mysterious motives. Paige must endure her forced indenture, serving her keeper, all the while trying to decipher his secrets and hoping to find a way to escape back to London.
The thing that impressed me about this book was the depth of world building. The alternate London and Oxford of 2059 feels very dense and lived in, with a decent amount of lore that sets up the world. It is a bit of an info-dump in the way it's told when we're introduced to Paige, the secret societies and the paranormal world in which she lives, but there are maps and a chart that lists the seven orders of clairvoyance at the start of the book, with a glossary of the slang used throughout at the back of the book to refer to if it gets confusing when you read through.
Once you get past the introduction though, and into the story itself, whilst it is a bit of slow burn, the further you read, the more it begins to pick up and pull you into the story. With Paige as our analogue, narrating the story, we see the world through her eyes. She is a strong female lead, if a bit too cynical and sarcastic at times, especially in her confrontations with Warden. But she does stand up for herself and does develop overall as a character over the course of the book, as she also realises that her life before her kidnapping wasn't what she thought it was after all. We meet some interesting supporting characters along the way too. The Rephaite, Warden isn't quite who he appears to be at first, burying his secrets well, but as a bond of trust develops between him and Paige, more of his character is teased and revealed. Other characters like Liss, Julian, Michael and Seb are pretty good too, especially impressive considering the short periods of time Paige spends with them. The villains of the piece, the Rephaim, and in particular Nashira, and their Voyant recruits are a brutal and nasty lot, inflicting punishments on the lower caste of prisoners / slaves. Definitely dangerous foes that Paige has to be wary of.
'The Bone Season' is a good slow burn of read that treads on a few YA dystopian tropes, but it has an interesting concept, deep world building and some good characters to keep you engrossed and entertained with. A credible debut by Samantha Shannon that has recently also been optioned as a TV series.
I would also recommend reading the prequel novella, 'The Pale Dreamer' before starting this book. Published three years after 'The Bone Season', and set three years before, it does a good, if not better, job of introducing us to Paige, the Seven Seals syndicate and the world of spirits, poltergeists and clairvoyants. Some new editions of the paperback edition do include this story too.
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