You're right, that is putting it a bit mildly.
It's been awhile since I've written anything - I've thought about it, but it was pretty much in the same way you might think about calling Great Aunt Martha to thank her for the birthday present: I wanted to do it, I knew I should do it. But I kept letting other things get in the way and after a few weeks not doing it became the easier thing to do since facing up to the fact that I hadn't was too embarrassing.
I was in a cab with a group of people from work last week and we got onto the subject of title trends. For awhile there was the Something's Daughter then it was American Something. These days it feels like Bone is de rigeur in titles*.
City of Bones
The Bone Dragon
Daughter of Smoke and Bone
Shadow and Bone
The Bone Season
At some point over the next weeks I intend to review all of those, but I'm going to start with the one that I wanted to like the most, but didn't.
Brownian Motion Does The Bone Season
I should have loved The Bone Season. The recipe is one I know and love: kickass independant female protagonist, magic, an alternate version of London, and a villain of mysterious origin. But The Bone Season was half baked at best and I don't think I'd want to serve it up to anyone.
My biggest complaint about the book is one I've heard elsewhere: it feels crowded, as though Samantha Shannon was trying desperately to cram as much as she could into her debut in case it was her only chance.
Worse, these bits of world building, which make up some of the best writing in the book (not a backhanded compliment - it is good writing) come at the most awkward moments, throwing you out of the story rather than pulling you deeper into the world the way good world building should.
I will also admit to not liking the main character. Her father works for the government and she has had a fairly privileged upbringing. Yet the character as we meet her is all street slang. I'd accept putting on a front to fit in with her new criminal life, but even interior monologues are riddled with it. There is no sign of the type of character I would expect from someone with her backstory. I didn't find her believable except in tiny moments, and those were few and far between.
Let's talk about the slang: there is just too much of it. I didn't find the glossary until part way through the book but I was more annoyed after finding it since I was spending so much time flipping back and forth between new words and their definitions that I actually lost my place more than once. Harry Potter got away with introducing us to a whole new vocabulary because the terms were explained by other characters in-story or presented in a way that explained them to us without resorting to info-dump.
Which brings me to my next complaint. As good as the writing in the info-dumpy sections is, it's still info-dump. Shannon never resorts to 'As you know, the King, your father' but she comes close on a few occasions. I've always liked show not tell, and most of this novel is tell.
At first, I accepted all of this, as annoying as it was, and probably would have given Shannon more of a break (young writer, debut novel, huge expectations) until I got about 5/6 of the way through. This is the point when the camel of slang and info-dump had its back smashed by a TOTALLY unnecessary love story.
I've tweeted about my desire to see a YA novel without a love triangle crammed into it. I read so much YA I'm boooooooooored of them. You always know who the heroine is going to pick and a lot of the time there is nothing particularly original about the path that part of the story takes. But a stereotypical YA love triangle would have been 1000 times better than the sudden...thing that happens in this book.
I'm not going to analyse it, or break it down because I don't think I can be objective. I hated it. I was reading on the train and I honestly did a double-take and said 'what?' out loud. Then I had to put the book away because I didn't think I could get through any more of it in a public place.**
I will say that based on Paige's behaviour and internal monologue up to that point her sudden change of heart it completely unbelievable. Two or three books from now? Maybe. Probably. But like the world-building it feels as though Shannon wrote the love angle as a box ticking exercise. There is something fundamentally missing from the story if she expects me, as a reader, to buy into this relationship.
Will I read the book again? Probably not. The hype about the originality of the world is deserved and I when I got over being yanked out of the story, I enjoyed the way the info-dump sections were written, but it just wasn't compelling enough for me to want to climb back into it or to anticipate the next book.
Brownian Motion Rating:
Day 1: Sigh.
Day 2: Sigh.
Day 3: Sigh.
Day 4: Sigh.
Day - oh you get the point.
*We're just waiting for the American Daughter's Bones to come out and complete the circle.
** I tossed American Psycho across the room halfway through the rodent scene because I couldn't take anymore. The Bone Season is a lot bigger and the train was very crowded.
