Book Review: The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon

Title: The Bone Season
Author: Samantha Shannon
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Audible
This book would be rated: PG-13 for language, violence and a couple of sexy scenes

Sometimes I find myself really enjoying a book while I'm reading or listening to it, and then in the span of time in between finishing the book and writing the book review, I forget nearly everything about the book, that is a sign to me that it wasn't a great book in the first place.

The Bone Season was getting tons of hype a month or so ago. I must have gotten half a dozen emails from Amazon and Audible and Goodreads about it (yes, I realize they are all the same company), and eventually I found myself suckered into buying it, even though I know that I'm not a huge fan of dystopian novels and I'm also not a huge fan of trilogies.

Paige Mahoney is living in London in 2059. Her father thinks she works at an oxygen bar in the city, but she's really a voyant (someone with supernatural powers), and she works as part of an underground syndicate with other voyants. She's able to enter into the dreams and minds of other people, and she accidentally uses this power to kill several people on a train. This blows her cover and she's rounded up and shipped off to Oxford, a city where voyants can live out in the open, but they are controlled by Rephaim, an alien species.

Paige, being a feisty girl, has no patience for her situation and wants to escape. She's put under the control of Warden, the fiance of the really creepy woman in charge of the whole place. Warden seems tough and cold, but eventually Paige learns that he also wants to be free of the rules of the place. But can a small group of fighters go up against all of the Rephaim?

 I felt that Paige was a fairly flat character-- she's a stock feisty girl, and Warden is pretty much exactly like Edward Cullen or Matthew Clairmont from Discovery of Witches. I didn't want them to get together, but it felt inevitable that they would.  And reading about fighting bores me, but overall the book is engaging and easy to listen to. But that doesn't mean that I'm on board with books two and three in the series.