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    The Bone Season
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    The Bone Season
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    The Bone Season
    Ebook627 pages9 hours

    The Bone Season

    By Samantha Shannon

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    BY THE AUTHOR OF THE SUNDAY TIMES AND NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER THE PRIORY OF THE ORANGE TREE

    A dreamer who can start a revolution

    For the past two hundred years the Scion government has led an oppressive campaign against unnaturalness in London.

    Clairvoyance in all its forms has been decreed a criminal offence, and those who practise it viciously punished. Forced underground, a clairvoyant underworld has developed, combating persecution and evading capture.

    Paige Mahoney, a powerful dreamwalker operating in the Seven Dials district of London, leads a double life, using her unnaturalness illegally while hiding her gift from her father, who works for the Scion regime...

    This beautiful new edition includes the prequel novella, The Pale Dreamer
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateAug 20, 2013
    ISBN9781408836446
    Unavailable
    The Bone Season
    Author

    Samantha Shannon

    Samantha Shannon is the New York Times bestselling author of The Bone Season and The Roots of Chaos series. Her work has been translated into twenty-eight languages. She lives in London. samanthashannon.co.uk / @say_shannon

    Read more from Samantha Shannon

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    Reviews for The Bone Season

    4/5

    88 ratings67 reviews

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    • 3/5
      3 stars for plot, 4 stars for world-building. The classification of different types of clairvoyants laid an excellent foundation for the story. But for a projected series of seven novels, this was a first book that did both too much and too little. Virtually all of the book's central conflict feels resolved, so I'm not sure what will carry the plots of the next six books. At the same time, there are a couple of things that weren't fully explained--how do you kill Death, anyway?--but I'm not sure I'm invested enough to read another book going for the answers. I can live without them.
    • 3/5
      Augh, if I had known there were going to be seven of these, I'd have waited a while to read it.
    • 4/5
      This was more of a 3.5 star book for me. It had a great beginning and a great ending but it really lost me in the middle. I almost didn't finish because the book took such an unusual turn after the fantastic start. I am not going to lie, I thought the story about a girl who could control ghosts in a twisted version of London was way more interesting than what happens after she is captured. I finished but honestly don't know if I will read the next one.

    • 5/5
      Looking forward to the next book.
    • 5/5
      Oh why didn't I read this book sooner?! When I first started and saw that chart at the beginning I was a little overwhelmed and thought it might just be too much, but it wasn't. This book was so good. I loved the story and the characters. There was a lot of intensity, especially in the last half of the book. I was planning on reading a different book when I finished this one but now I definitely need to go straight to The Mime Order!
    • 5/5
      I actually loved this book. I wasn't sure if it was going to live up to hype, but I really enjoyed it. Can't wait for the next one!
    • 3/5
      There were many things I liked about this book, but they were overshadowed by the many things I didn't like. To begin with the use of slang sometimes stopped me focusing on the story - there were several times I had to back track to make sense of the sentence or situation.
      I found at a point about a third of the way through the book the numerous new characters, slang and various geographical references combined with a lack of narrative pace just got too confusing. I stopped reading for a couple of days until I could face it again.

      Also the use of roman numeral combined with arabic numerals got really annoying for me - I was never sure if I should read XX-59-40 as twenty-fiftynine-forty or xx-fiftynine-forty. This also was confusting in sentences refering to various districts of london several times in the sentence I read "I" as a personal pronoun and several words on I realised that it was in fact roman numeral "I" refering to first district.

      For the first two thirds of the book the main character is swept along by events - in fact very little of what happens is under her control which, while understandable in the circumstances she finds herself, is more than a little frustrating as a reader.
      I also had difficulty keeping track of the timeline in the book. It seems to be tracking from day to day but at one point a character mentions that they have been living there for months when it seemed to me that at best they had been there for a fortnight.
      My final gripe is the "relationship" between our protagonist and her keeper / trainer / jailor - it kind of creeped me out - stockholm syndrome anyone?

      Form all of that you may be forgiven for thinking I hated it - I didn't- but I did think it reads like a first book, and one that is setting out a very complex world that I hope will become more comprehensible as the series goes on and I will be reading the next book when it is released.
      The second half of this book does travel fast and is very readable with a good amount of suspense and action. You just have to get through the first half to get there. I am hoping that the next books explain the political situation in greater depth because I am still kind of trying to work out exactly why the psychics are so feared by the general population as it was stated several times that psychics cannot affect / hurt non-psychics (Not that humanity in general has always needed a reason to hate anyone). Also I'm having a little trouble believing that the rest of europe is so agreeable in their co-operation with britain.
    • 5/5
      I haven't been this excited for a series from this genre in a very long time. The book is very complicated for the first 100 pages or so, but it's not rocket science, and it's totally worth it.I wouldn't call the concepts in this book "original", however, because aether is from Stephen King, I believe. How it works in this series is very similar to how it works in Stephen King-verse.
    • 4/5
      Not bad, enjoyable alternate history/fantasy.
    • 5/5
      Absolutely brilliant novel by a new young Author! This is the first in the series and I am looking forward to reading more.
    • 4/5
      The narrator is a young woman named Paige Mahoney in 2059 London. For the past two hundred years aliens have lived in the area previously known as Oxford, sequestered from humans. Paige is a clairvoyant with a talent to see other people's dreams. She is living in London with a bunch of other young people with all different talents, in hiding. One day she is kidnapped by government agents and handed over to the aliens known as Rephaites. Shannon has created a detailed world with an established system, as dysfunctional and anti-abnormals as can be. Paige knows that she can't expect help from the outside and she is on her own. This story has an ending but a series is promised.
    • 5/5
      Paige Mahoney is a 19 year-old girl, living in London. She is a clairvoyant, and being clairvoyant is illegal. Mahoney pretends to work in an oxygen bar, which is a bar with flavored air, but she has a real job. Paige works for Jaxon Hall, and she is a dreamwalker. For a time, no one suspects that she is a voyant, but soon enough.. Her luck runs dry. She is captured for killing two of the SciLo agents, and she is held in their jail. She is taken in by the blood-consort, of the blood-sovereign, and he is his apprentice. She calls him Warden. Warden is a Rephaite, and she finds him near death, a total of about 3 times. He teaches her how to effectively use her power, and soon, she learns to control other animals and people. Nashira is the blood-sovereign, and she plans to steal Paige's power. Both Warden and Paige clearly don't want that. Warden works behind Nashira's back, and develops a love for his own apprentice. Paige. Paige kills Nashira's brother, and so she is scheduled to die. Behind the stage, where she's going to be hanged, Warden kisses her, and then... Nashira catches them. They are both to die. They have a huge all-out fight and Paige and her friends there manage to escape.. Warden made the choice to stay. I liked this book a large lot, because it was intriguing. But the book had really confusing parts... Thank goodness for the glossary. In the book, also, there is a bunch of action parts. This book is different, also, things I've never read about. Rephaim, voyants, amaurotics, and dreamwalking. Paige is a dreamwalker, and she can control people's actions slightly. I think dreamwalking is quite fascinating. But every book has some faults.. This book was actually VERY confusing, at points. I honestly got lost really easily in the slang and species and... Anyhow, this book was good. I enjoyed it. I rated it a 4 and a half for this reason.
    • 4/5
      In the not-too-distant future, London is controlled by a totalitarian force called Scion, whose sole purpose is to discover and destroy the "unnatural curse" of clairvoyance. When Paige Mahoney, a dreamwalker (a rare type of clairvoyant), is captured by Scion agents, she believes her life is about to end in torture and death. But when she awakens in Sheol I, a prison camp dedicated to teaching voyants to fight an enemy called the Emim, Paige discovers that the world she thought she knew is not at all what it seems. To escape and survive, Paige, who has been renamed XX-59-40, will find herself making unlikely allies as the line between enemies and friends has become blurred almost beyond recognition. Throw in some otherworldly creatures, some who are supposed protectors and others who just want to eat people, and you have the makings of an epic sf/fantasy series. LJ ReviewsSaw this on the Express shelf at my library and took a chance. Impressive debut novel by a 22 (!) year old author featuring an alternative history of the world--well, of the UK anyway--beginning in 1901, otherworld beings worthy of C.S. Lewis and--the now obligatory--creatures who feed on human blood. More fantasy than science fiction but on an epic scale, the novel includes a glossary of terms for the many castes of "voyants". More volumes to come and movie rights have been purchased. Should prove to be another enjoyable cash cow similar to the Potter series.7 out of 10. Recommended to fans of literary magic and to readers of fantasy and alternate reality fiction.
    • 4/5
      With her imaginative and well-written debut, The Bone Season (Bloomsbury, 2013), Samantha Shannon bursts onto the literary scene (and I suspect the bestseller lists as well). This book had me hooked right from the first pages and didn't let up even for a moment. Shannon's crafted a richly-detailed dystopian world where clairvoyance is real but those who exhibit it are treated as criminals, forced to eke out a meager existence or take up with London's criminal underclass. But when young, powerful voyant Paige Mahoney is captured by the authorities, it's no regular prison for her: she's removed to the secret city of Oxford, where she learns of a force much darker and more powerful than any human captors. The gripping and entirely enjoyable start to what promises to be a captivating series.
    • 4/5
      Halloween 2013#5I am not yet sure what made me pick this book up as one of my Halloween reads, maybe it was the genre listed as "Paranormal" and "Dystopian". I do admit to being curious to read this book in general, with the young author already being hailed as the next [[Rowling]]. The declaration being a bit premature, in hindsight, maybe.There is no denying the fact that [[Samantha Shannon]] has a lot potential as a writer, her imagination good, and the execution not too shabby. However, in her debut novel, I think she tried to do a bit too much, a bit too soon. In a novel of this size, she created a new Dystopian world, added a couple of alien races, not-so-ordinary human beings (and tonnes of categories of them, no less!) and strung along far too many ideas for a reader to keep track of, or make associations and connections with.Then there was the fact that the protagonist was not likeable, not one bit. Indeed, she was annoying for the most part, and mule-headed for the other. And she didn't even have the benefit of a traumatic past like Katniss Everdeen or Lisbeth Salander to explain her behaviour. The biggest shock she seemed to have undergone is the fact that her first crush is gay! Boo hoo! Cry me a river and see if I care!Having said all of the above, the effort for a debut novel was fantastic, I hope and believe she will only improve from here. The theme and ideas in the novel were quite original, the concepts and powers quite fresh and the writing satisfactory.I am reasonably certain that I will try the sequel as well - but will I continue to read the series (the series is intended to have 7 books from what I have read), is a question for another time.In this review, I have obviously dwelt more on the negative and done little to justify my 3.5 star rating. That however, was the intention, to highlight why this book didn't get a 4 or 4.5 from me, rather than the other way around.
    • 4/5
      I've heard so much about The Bone Season, which was quite possibly one of this summer's most talked about debuts by author Samantha Shannon. Though I'm the kind of person who's generally wary of the hype machine, I won't deny I was quite curious to see for myself what all the fuss was about! And now that I've had the chance to finish the audiobook, I can certainly understand why readers have been so impressed by it. Though not officially marketed as a Young Adult novel, I'm also not surprised to see so many categorize The Bone Season as such. The nature of its story, main character and dystopian setting all mingle to give it that distinctive YA vibe, yet that's not to say that adults won't be able to enjoy this too. The book's crossover appeal probably has a lot to do its protagonist and narrator, 19-year-old Paige Mahoney who is a strong, mature and level-headed heroine with whom a wide audience can relate. Paige is also known as a "Dreamwalker", in this alternate world set in the future where individuals like her who possess supernatural abilities are called "Voyants". The book takes place in London, 2059 where the security force Scion holds authority, declaring all voyants criminals simply by existing. Paige is forced to live a secret life, working for the underworld organization where she gathers information by using her rare powers to breaking into other people's minds.When an unfortunate incident leads to her arrest, however, Paige finds herself imprisoned at a penal colony in Oxford, a city long forgotten. She finds out that Scion has been sending captured voyants here to become slaves and soldiers to an otherworldly race called the Rephaim. She is assigned to Warden, her Rephaim keeper in charge of her care and training. Now all Paige wants to do is to escape and find her way home, but as the days goes by she discovers there is a lot more at stake than just her freedom.First, the good stuff: I really like Paige, a smart and capable young woman who is also not infallible. Her history is well-developed and written in such a way that the details about her past get revealed gradually throughout the course of the novel, keeping things interesting for those curious about her story. My Audible version of The Bone Season is narrated by Irish actress Alana Kerr, who brings Paige to life. This was the first experience I've had with her work, and I could be wrong but I believe she's new to reading audiobooks. Generally, I prefer narrators who can do a broader range of voices (because sometimes it was hard to tell which character was speaking) but I probably wouldn't be averse to checking out her future audiobook performances if she does any. Overall I was happy with her reading, because her voice did such a wonderful job conveying Paige's strength and poise.The world Samantha Shannon has created is also amazingly detailed, but this also means an almost overwhelming amount of information to take in. This does cause some hitches in the pacing, especially during the first half of the novel which felt a lot slower than the second half. I also had to go back several times at the beginning to learn and familiarize myself with all the different names and terms of people, places, organizations, voyant types, and slang. That wasn't so easy to do with an audiobook, but you know what? It was worth it to get the full impact of the setting, and I got to appreciate just how rich it really is.In the end, for a debut novel from a 21-year-old new author, I have to say The Bone Season was incredibly impressive! Hype can be a dangerous thing somtimes, and though it can be tough to ignore the comparisons calling this book the next Hunger Games or Samantha Shannon the next J.K. Rowling, I think going into this book with realistic expectations helped me a lot. I came out of this one pleasantly surprised, and I'm definitely open to reading more from this author and series.
    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed this story. I didn't have a problem with the language so I didn't need the dictionary the book provides. This is the story of a young girl with paranormal abilities working for a criminal organization with other paranormals. Sentenced for a crime and sent to a prison, she has to battle with aliens who live on the planet in secret. I didn't care for the bit of romance thrown in at the end. The story stands on its own without being a romance for teens. Let's hope the nonsense stops in the next book. This is a brilliant world Ms. Shannon has created. I fear she will cater to the teens and go heavy on the hijinx to win them over. Read and enjoy.
    • 4/5
      So impressive that Samantha Shannon was still at university in her early 20s when she wrote this, her debut novel. It has had an amazing amount of publicity, including an author interview on Librarything. I admire the world building, the use of Victorian slang that had me baffled, but impressed, and a bit angry when I found there was a glossary at the back of the book after I had finished!). I appreciate the work that's gone into it but I didn't really enjoy this book. I don't think I liked any of the characters. And that this book in essence is a teen romance, disguised as a paranormal psychic mystery, with some well-researched history and an obvious love of oxford and England. Over promised and under delivered.
    • 1/5
      Not so good. Overhyped.
    • 5/5
      I'm going to be completely honest here. It took me until I was about 40% into this novel before it really grabbed me. I typically give up before then if it isn't something I'm really loving, but I had numerous recommendations from other librarians that I trust. Once I hit 40% mark, I got hooked. Big time. People are giving up before the story gets going, and I don't blame them. BUT!! The book gets SO MUCH BETTER! Is it over-hyped? A bit, but it is still a fantastic work of fiction. The author has planned a 7-book series, so maybe she isn't trying to show her cards all at once in the first novel. Who knows? I definitely recommend to folks who enjoy urban fantasy.
    • 4/5
      Paige is a gifted clairvoyant living in a future London where clairvoyants are hunted down and executed. Seeking a way to protect herself she joined a criminal gang who become her teachers, co-conspirators, and de facto family. She is captured, surprised not to be killed but instead shipped off with many other prisoners to a secret, isolated detention center located in the old Oxford University buildings. She finds out that this penal colony is run by creatures from another world determined to train and use the clairvoyants as a defense against horrible, violent monsters making their way into the world through the same "rips" that allowed in her jailers. I really liked Paige - she is a strong, independent, self-confident young woman. There is a hint of Steampunk flavor, just a wave of the Steampunk brush, that may appeal to Steampunk fans. I felt this story is more action than substance, and there is plenty of action. It is a weird mix of historical elements and fantasy, though some of the historical background seemed a bit mixed up, especially regarding King Edward VII. Hopefully this will just encourage readers, like me, to research a little deeper into the historical characters and time periods referenced in this book (one of the reasons I am a big historical fiction fan). The Bone Season caught my attention enough that I wanted to find out what happens next, but I also felt that it was somewhat convoluted and tended to meander around, with an unduly complicated layout and threads left hanging or not fully followed or fleshed out. This novel is the first in a planned series of seven novels, so this may have been necessary in order to have a strong structure built even if it is not fully explored in this book. All in all, despite some of the inconsistencies, I did enjoy reading this and it kept me turning pages.
    • 5/5
      It's not often these days that I manage to concentrate enough to read a novel in one week, but The Bone Season was that compelling. The future setting immediately reminded me of The Hunger Games, but that's where the comparison ended. Set in England, clairvoyants of this future are criminals that are rounded up and never heard from again. Paige is a very strong clairvoyant working for an underground syndicate. When captured, Paige discovers that all manner of clairvoyants are delivered to the now secret city of Oxford, where they are trained as a slave army to fight an invader from a different reality. With the guidance of her master/mentor, Warden, she develops her powers further and yearns to return to her old life.Upon completing the book, I am very much looking forward to the continuation of the series, and also to see this story turned into a movie.
    • 2/5
      I was bored and uninterested halfway through and it never changed all the way to the end. I am impressed at how expansive the world building has been attempted at such a young age. But throw in uninteresting characters the plot just cant survive.
    • 3/5
      This book is hard to review, because I recognize that a big chunk of how I feel is based on my level of expectation going into it. It's one of the most hyped books of the year, the author has been compared to J.K. Rowling, and film rights have already been optioned. You can't really go into a book knowing that and expect it to win and impress you. So let me put that aside, and try to break it down a bit.

      This world takes place in a future society called Scion, where clairvoyant people known as "voyants" are condemned. Paige, our heroine, is a dreamwalker and has a very rare talent of being able to break into people's minds. She works in underground London in a secret "voyant" crew called the Seven Seals, but gets captured whisked off to Oxford, a hidden area controlled by another race call the Rephaim.

      This book's greatest "strength" is probably in its world building. You can argue that the world building is sophisticated and complex. However, it was a bit confusing for me. I often felt bored, and inundated by a bunch of words that "told" me more than "showed" me. The author used a ton of made-up words that I grasped to understand the meaning of, even in context. Thankfully, I found a glossary at the end of the book which I referenced very often. But I felt that everything was a bit overdone. When you strip it down to the basic elements of character and plot, the story is actually quite formulaic and unoriginal.

      One big aspect that was missing for me was characterization. When characters are flat, I tend to feel emotionally disconnected with them . Paige was probably the most developed, and I did appreciate Paige for her boldness and strength. Yet her care for a young boy she meets by the name of Seb felt very forced, as if he were there only to show you she has a soft side for a kid and to make you like her. I've seen this trick before! I need a little more than that to make me feel a character. Also, I couldn't see Warden as much more (at this point) than a very beautiful looking robotic being with compelling eyes. Of course there is mystery and much more to uncover as we progress through the series, since this is only book 1 out of 7. Sometimes books need to build, but I would definitely like to see more complexity, growth, and some depth in a variety of characters that I can know and love (versus a focus on only one or two mains.)

      I did find small douses of amazingness sprinkled in. I was interested enough to get through the very long book, in a very short amount of time. So it did keep my attention. I will continue reading the next in the series to see where it goes.
    • 5/5
      I had been wanting to read this book for a long time now. After I found it at the local library, I decided to just jump right into it, since I wasn't totally persuaded one way or another with other reviews. I loved it. Every minute of it. The story was thrilling. I'll read the next book for sure.
    • 1/5
      I've picked this book and put it down a dozen times. I just can't get through it. The plot is such an interesting concept, but it gets lost in the insane amount of details the author puts about EVERYTHING. I even tried just reading a chapter at a time, but once I realized I kept falling asleep before finishing a chapter, I knew it was done-zo. Maybe I'll pick it back up at another time, but for now I'm calling it quits at 42%.
    • 3/5
      It's 2059 and nineteen-year-old Paige Mahoney works for Jaxon Hall in the criminal underworld of Scion London, based at Seven Dials. Her job is to break into people's minds using her dreamwalker abilities. One day she is chased, drugged and kidnapped. She wakes in Oxford, a city kept secret for two hundred years, where an otherworldly race are in control. Paige is chosen by Rephaite Warden, who never choses humans. This prison is where she was meant to die, but Warden has an agenda of his own. Interesting, but wouldn't read the next in the series.
    • 4/5
      In the London of the near future, those with psychic powers are either controlled by the government, or outlawed. Paige Mahoney is of the latter variety, and works for a gang run by Jaxon Hall... until she's caught. At that point, she's shipped off to an internment camp for clairvoyants, because, you know, when you're frightened of something, out of sight is out of mind, and at least you know someone else is taking care of it. Except this internment camp is really more slavery than rehabilitation. And there's more to this whole thing than meets even her critical eye.

      I listened to the audio book of The Bone Season, and I think my only critique of the reader is that she didn't really ever let her voice get 'excited' about anything.

      You know, it's strange. I hear that this book got a lot of hype -- and I read a lot of book review sites, and I poke my nose into an awful lot of places on reddit that you'd think I wouldn't, and I think the only place I really heard about this book was on the Tor.com upcoming books for the month post. I read the synopsis, stuck it on my to-read list, and didn't really return to it for a while, as happens when you have a to-read list as immense as I do. But in returning to it, I was richly rewarded.

      I have also heard that this book has been compared to J.K. Rowling. That -- that's so patently unfair it's hard for me to even address. If the publisher is responsible for it, they should be ashamed; if it's readers... I dunno what kind of books by J.K. Rowling you were reading, but it certainly was not Harry Potter. This story starts out dark, and there's nowhere to go but darker.

      The world building was rich and complex, and I really enjoyed Paige as a lead character. She was strong, intelligent and resourceful when approaching situations that I simply would wilt in the face of, and she recruits allies and friends from places you would not expect, even while wielding a gift that she would call anything but.

      In any case, I'm certainly looking forward to the next books.
    • 3/5
      Urgh I'm sorry all, I really did want to love this one as much as everyone else. I've discovered that psychic powers just don't intrigue me much. However, the amount of world-building shoved into these pages is both impressive and too much in my opinion. I felt nothing for the characters because I feel like I never got the chance to know them. I still read Bone Season shockingly quickly due to some addictive quality of the writing and will be trying to continue the series, but I really don't understand the hype I'm afraid. Also there are still blatant typos in the paperback, wtf?
    • 3/5
      First read this April 2014 and am re-reading this a second time for a book club (January 2015). I like the story as a whole, but some of the details weigh it down. It bothered me more in the second reading than the first.