The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon

Bone Season #1

Book summary:

     "It is the year 2059. Several major world cities are under the control of a security force called Scion. Paige Mahoney works in the criminal underworld of Scion London, part of a secret cell known as the Seven Seals. The work she does is unusual: scouting for information by breaking into others’ minds. Paige is a dreamwalker, a rare kind of clairvoyant, and in this world, the voyants commit treason simply by breathing.

     But when Paige is captured and arrested, she encounters a power more sinister even than Scion. The voyant prison is a separate city—Oxford, erased from the map two centuries ago and now controlled by a powerful, otherworldly race. These creatures, the Rephaim, value the voyants highly—as soldiers in their army.

     Paige is assigned to a Rephaite keeper, Warden, who will be in charge of her care and training. He is her master. Her natural enemy. But if she wants to regain her freedom, Paige will have to learn something of his mind and his own mysterious motives."

So, I finally got through this book. It took me longer than I would have liked. This was a fairly intense read. The book was like nothing else I have read.

Paige was a really strong character. Stubborn, smart, but she still had a small part of innocence and naivete about her that was really believable and refreshing in a heroine. All the other characters were different from each other and there was some fairly gray lines about who was a "good guy" and who was bad when it came to her crew. Jaxon, her mime-lord (boss) he at times was just as bad as the Rephaite. And Warden was very kind to her, even though she spent most of the book loathing him on principle. But who really could blame her since she was basically his slave until other wise told.

With every new book set in a new world there was a fair amount of info-dumping, and some of the memory parts, where she was remembering things from her past kind of set a slow pace to the book. It was all interesting and became important information, but it did slow the book down at times.

Learning about a new sci-fi world is always an experience, and sometimes it's done in a way that isn't anything that new, or it tries to be new and fails at it. This does neither. While it did give a lot of information, it still left enough unanswered that more can be learned in future books.

This book was an interesting unique story, that I highly recommend. I am excited to read the sequel.