“The single most beautiful and terrible thing I’d ever laid eyes on.”
No, I’m not referring to my usual hipster pick up lines at the bars in Silverlake. I am talking about the next epic series to be whispered with the likes of Harry Potter and The Hunger Games (whoever compares this to Fifty Shades of Gray should be shot in a dark alley.) The book I am referring to is the little dark horse called The Bone Season.
Doesn’t the title even sound fracking cool?
Also, to make you even more jealous about not having that novel you have spent years writing on napkins done…channeling your inner J.K. Rowling are we? The author was born in 1992. Yes, she’s only 22. How are you feeling now? Have I intrigued you yet?
Bone Season takes place in a dystopian England, year 2059, now called Scion London. SciLo is a place where “unnaturals” — humans with supernatural access to the “aether” (realm of the spirits) — roam the world and are feared to no extent. These “unnaturals” can be anything from a common soothsayer to a rare dreamwalker; which our protaganist, 19-year-old Paige Mahoney, just so happens to be.
To avoid being punished for just possessing her gift, Paige ends up being a part of a very powerful criminal gang called the Seven Seals (we take it the author likes Ingmar Bergman?). In exchange for her personal safety, she works under the power hungry mime-lord, Jaxon Hall, helping him collect the rare clairvoyants in the surrounding cities. With the use of top clairvoyants and even a few poltergeists, the Seven Seals have gone unseen and undisturbed. Until the day, Paige finds herself a bloodless murderer and is being taken to a discrete location called Sheol 1. A place where she meets a prison that is disguised as a “safety net” for clairvoyants where they can “be themselves.”
Avoiding more parentheses, this is also where she meets the yellow-eyed beauties that feed off the auras of clairvoyants.
Paige finds herself under the watchful eye of the Warden (the blood-consort Arcturus, who is also engaged to the power hungry, Nashira, leader of Sheol 1). Little does she know that there is more than meets the yellow eyes of Arcturus and he might be her only way out of this Nazi-like clairvoyant camp.
I guarantee that Bone Season will be the next big thing, if not the biggest novel of 2013 and beyond. Trust me… After all, I consider myself a little clairvoyant.
Samantha Shannon is the overachieving English author of Bone Season and has already signed on to do six more sequels in The Bone Season series. Did I also mention that this is the same publishing company as Harry Potter? Naw, but it’s Bloomsbury.
My only question is whether this recent Oxford grad will completely regret committing herself to seven books, seeing that it did take her two years to write the first one. Even so, Shannon definitely has the creative juice and skills to write a novel that you won’t be able to put down. She has been writing since she was fifteen, (15…pause for comedic relief) and, despite all the story’s intrigue and development, there are certain aspects of her skills that show weakness. At this point, Shanon is simply not up to par with authors such as J.K. Rowling and Suzanne Collins.
Not yet.
These weaknesses come out in the fact that you have to keep the provided clairvoyant glossary on hand as you are reading due to the cornucopias amount of character names, clairvoyant types, etc. Other than the mass amount of names and sometimes confusing fight scenes, Shannon is the shiz and there is no denying it. I want to be friends with her and go and write novels together as we sip tea in a quaint London café.
Either way, she is kicking all of our arses when it comes to being an accomplished author. I guess I’ll go throw away my napkins… Or will I?
If you want to follow up on Samantha Shannon’s life, and stalk her like I did for a few weeks, you can follow her on twitter @ Say_Shannon. The Bone Season is available where all good books are sold.