I felt a sense of relief when I finally finished The Bone Season. This book was way too long and did not work very well for me for a few reasons:
The worldbuilding was way too complicated. Shannon was inventing slang and concepts left and right with no rhyme or reason. Terms are never introduced naturally and readers have to flip back to the glossary way too often. I couldn’t see a reason for using new terms for things that already existed within our world.
The plot was simply too slow. All of the action is packed into the last 100 pages of the book and by the time I got there I just wanted to get things over with and could not be brought to care about events.
Paige is not a very proactive main character. One of the things I cannot stand in books is when the main character just waits for things to happen to them. Up until the last 100 pages of this book all Paige did was walk, be bossed around and make meaningless smalltalk with side characters (which I think was supposed to get readers emotionally invested in those characters, but unfortunately did not work for me).
This was really surprising for me as I had really enjoyed Samantha Shannon’s previous writing. The writing itself was good and you can tell Shannon is a good author, but I don’t think any editing in the world could make this clichéd 2013 story line work for readers in 2024. I look forward to seeing what Shannon does next but I will definitely not be picking up the rest of this series.
