“What disrupts the book most often, though, is the author,” said Elizabeth Word Gutting in The Washington Post. Routine references to things like “dreamwalkers” and “splanchomancy” force us to flip back again and again to a nine-page glossary. Readers with a low tolerance for “paranormal jibber-jabber” won’t get very far, said Ethan Gilsdorf in The Boston Globe. “The only way to find out what happens is just to keep reading.” Yet The Bone Season follows no rote path. Paige’s captors even have a vampire-like habit of drinking human blood. And the familiar tropes keep coming, said Leila Sales in. Arrested by the fascist rulers of 2059 England because she’s gifted with clairvoyance, 19-year-old Paige Mahoney has been imprisoned at a penal colony where Oxford used to be. The Bone Season features a “clever and courageous” heroine who’s strongly reminiscent of The Hunger Games’ Katniss Everdeen. “If Shannon’s writing were not quite so heartfelt,” you could easily picture her having cynically fused together elements from several recent best-sellers, said Helen Brown in The Telegraph (U.K.).
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