Review: The Bone Season

Already read this review? You can check out Daniel’s review of The Mime Order, the next book in the series, here.

For a long time, I had kept noticing a particular book sitting on my shelf. I was intrigued by the title and by the blurb, but I had no idea where this book had come from. Nobody else could remember how I got it either. Nonetheless, it continued to sit there untouched until recently my curiosity won out and I decided it was finally time to see what it was all about.

This book was The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon. The Bone Season is a supernatural dystopia story, following nineteen-year-old Paige Mahoney in an alternate universe London as she tries to survive a world that persecutes clairvoyants. She discovers that things are even more grim than they seem after being captured by the authorities and stuck in a prison camp. Paige learns of a mysterious race called the Rephaim that are pulling many of Scion London’s strings from the shadows and of inter-planar dangers she never knew existed. 

I had no idea what to expect when I picked this up and things quickly took a surprising turn with Paige’s capture and the introduction of the Rephaim. Suddenly the world was very different than I thought and the focus of the story shifted to a very different place than I thought it was going after the first chapter. The Bone Season is an intriguing book that straddles the line between being YA and being more adult-oriented and I feel like it’s a good topic for my next review.

Strengths

I had no real idea of what to expect when I went into The Bone Season. The blurb was intriguing, but told me very little. I had never heard of the book before and its very presence on my shelf was a mystery. So, honestly, I was a little apprehensive picking it up.

My concerns were, of course, pretty unfounded. The story was a good read and there were quite a few things I really liked about it.

Worldbuilding
As with my previous review, the first positive I want to talk about in The Bone Season is worldbuilding. Shannon very quickly paints a clear and vivid picture of Scion London. It is a place that doesn’t look that different from the world we know - albeit just a tiny bit into the future. But with the introduction of the advent of clairvoyance, this world’s timeline split off from ours during the reign of Edward VII, who became a very different person as a result. Therefore, while resembling our own world, the world in The Bone Season is different. Scion London doesn’t look dissimilar to London in reality, but it is a strict dystopia. Pleasures are largely banned, everything is rigidly organised, criminals are harshly and brutally prosecuted, the police force is everywhere and clairvoyants are an oppressed underclass.

This is all clearly communicated in ways that are easy to understand without the need for information dumps. Things then become more layered and complicated once we learn of the Rephaim and the conspiracy of their relationship with Scion. 

At no point though does anything ever feel shallow or dissonant. Quite the opposite. Despite having many of the hallmarks of a typical modern dystopian setting, the worldbuilding of The Bone Season feels better constructed than most. The world doesn’t revolve around its protagonist and it feels lived in, storied and nuanced in interesting ways.

The Magic System
Clairvoyance, as it is in The Bone Season, interests me a lot as a magic system. Essentially, certain individuals can connect with the aether and with the spirits of the dead who linger on the mortal coil and use these things to fuel certain powers. Typically this means they can channel the spirits of the dead to gain access to gifts they possessed in life, bind spirits, see glimpses of the future or influence the minds of others. Although each clairvoyant would generally only have one gift. There does also seem to be a more generic ability to gather up spirits and direct them at a target that all clairvoyants share to some degree.

What I find interesting about this is that despite being a fairly hard magic system, it is also much simpler in reality than it is portrayed in-universe. In-universe, clairvoyance is something still being explored by scholars. There is an ongoing effort by some characters to discover and classify different types of clairvoyance and the story makes it clear that while the basic mechanics of clairvoyance are understood, that’s about it.

Having a fairly hard system but still having so much mystery and uncertainty around the gift isn’t something you see a lot of. Usually, when you have a harder system, the specifics of that system are pretty well understood diegetically - at least by its practitioners. But this isn’t really the case in The Bone Season. The Raphaim certainly know more than the humans do, but we see few interactions with them that explain much.

It makes for an interesting vibe to the story that greatly enhances the atmosphere and this idea that humanity is greatly outclassed by the Rephaim, with only a burgeoning understanding of the gift of clairvoyance. In less skilled hands, this method of crafting and utilising a magic system could have gone much more poorly in ways that we touched on back in our Magic cycle on SAB.

Weaknesses

There actually isn’t a lot to discuss in the way of weaknesses when it comes to The Bone Season. Samantha Shannon is clearly a very technically proficient writer. Additionally, she was clearly working in a genre that she is plenty familiar with and has a good grasp on. For the most part, she was aware of the common pitfalls found in these stories and knew how to avoid them. That being said, there were two things I think could have been done a bit better.

Characters
Now, before I get into this criticism, I want to specify something. Specifically, I want to make it clear that the problem I have with the characters in The Bone Season is not that they are bad or uncompelling. Paige and Warden, as our most central characters, are interesting characters. Paige, as our protagonist, is a strongly written character whose motivations make sense and who you want to see succeed. In fact, pretty much all the characters in this book are interesting and compelling. So, why is this listed as a weakness?

Well, firstly, The Bone Season is a book populated with a lot of different characters. But outside of Paige and her keeper, we really don’t get enough time to know them. Liss and Julian are clearly important to the story and to Paige, but I feel like they are given less weight and prominence in the plot than the Seven Seals, who are barely present in the actual narrative outside of around three chapters. Other fairly noteworthy residents of Sheol I are given even less prominence than Liss and Julian are, even the ones that seem to be serving important roles in the story. It seems like a waste to have an entire colony of interesting and compelling characters only to give much more focus to characters who aren’t even around for most of the story. Obviously, the Seven Seals played a big role in Paige’s life before Sheol I and are set to play a bigger part in subsequent books in the series, but I don’t personally feel like this is enough to justify underutilisation characters in Sheol I.

Secondly, sometimes characters are simply shoved into roles that typical narrative conventions for the genre demand even if the writing in The Bone Season has not put them in these roles. A lesser example is the genuine loyalty Paige has for Jaxon Hall, despite the fact he treats her pretty poorly. This is at least somewhat believable though. A much more glaring example is a sudden romantic turn between two characters who at no point in the story have had any lead up to that moment. In fact, there has never been so much as a hint of romantic feeling between these characters. However, because the conventional tropes of the genre would put the two in this position, Shannon does so even though none of her previous writing implies things would go in this direction. A part of me wonders, given the quality of the writing everywhere else and how jarring this is, if this was something the author was pushed into by an editor or publisher. Nonetheless, it’s there.

Regardless, that is the issue with the characters in The Bone Season. It isn’t that they are poorly constructed or uninteresting, they are quite the opposite. But for how compelling the characters are in a vacuum, there are issues with how they are utilised (or underutilised) peppered through the book.

Flashbacks
This is a much smaller complaint and, honestly, a lot more to do with personal taste in book formatting than the quality of the writing itself. In the later parts of The Bone Season, the story starts sprinkling in flashback chapters to earlier in Paige’s life. 

I think making it clearer in the formatting that these chapters were doing this would have been a benefit to the story. Obviously, it doesn’t stay unclear for long that we’re looking at the past given the characters and events we are shown. That being said, sometimes it did feel just a little jarring. I think simply formatting the chapters in a way that made these interludes more immediately obvious as flashbacks would have improved the general feeling of reading the book.

Comparatively, this was a very minor issue. But it’s something I wanted to mention anyway.

Conclusion

I liked this book. It was a pleasant surprise and by the time you are reading this review, I will have ordered The Mime Order to continue the series (which is still ongoing with book five due to release in the near future). 

That being said, I don’t think it’s going to be going to be going into my favourites list. The story is solid and Samantha Shannon is clearly a very skilled writer. Her prose is excellent and she has created a fascinating world with a story that could go just about anywhere direction-wise at this point.

However, I feel like sometimes The Bone Season falls short of how good it could have been. Characters that should have felt central to the plot were too frequently pushed out of focus in favour of characters not even present in Sheol I and certain jarring character choices left a bitter aftertaste. 

I’m hoping that with this book having been quite successful, despite me having never heard of it before finding it on my shelf, Shannon (and her publisher) will not be as concerned with sticking to genre conventions in the subsequent instalments and that with the Seven Seals actually set to be centre-stage in future books, the issue of underutilisation characters won’t be a problem anymore.

The Bone Season is good and I’m interested in seeing where things go, but I wouldn’t recommend this series to people who aren’t already fans of the genre just yet. We’ll see if that changes going forward.