Books: Shadow and Bone ~ Shadow and Bone #1 - Leigh Bardugo

 

Title:Shadow and Bone
Author: Leigh Bardugo
Publisher: Orion Children's Books
Publishing date: October 2020
Number of pages: 307 p.
Series: Shadow and Bone #1
Age Category: Young Adult
Genre: Epic/High Fantasy
Other Books In This Series:
Siege and Storm, book #2
Ruin and Rising, book #3

 

About Shadow and Bone

Orphaned and expendable, Alina Starkov is a soldier who knows she may not survive her first trek across the Shadow Fold - a swath of unnatural darkness crawling with monsters. But when her regiment is attacked, Alina unleashes dormant magic not even she knew sh possessed.

Now Alina will enter a lavish world of royalty and intrigue as she trains with the Grisha, her country's magical military elite - and falls under the spell of their notorios leader, the Darkling. He believes Alina can summon a force capable of destroying the Shadow Fold and reunitint their war-ravaged country, but only if she can master her untamed gift.

As the threat to the kingdom mounts and Alina unlocks the secrets of her past, she will make a dangerous discovery that could threaten all she loves and the very future of a nation.

Welcome to Ravka... a world of science and superstition where nothing is what it seems.

My Thoughts on Shadow and Bone

So my relationship with Shadow and Bone, has a lot of ups and downs. You could call it a hate/love affair. To give you an example, the first 50 pages I was thinking, what the hell is this world, where is my world building? Why is everyone been hyping this book up, so much? I got my answers shorly after as from this point the book picked up a lot. The pace of the book was more rapid, and the story became interesting all of a sudden.

I still would have loved to see more world building at the beginning of the book, as even after finishing the book I felt that we were missing out on so many things, the history of the kingdom, how the Darkling became the Darkling, I just missed depth. And I have now finish the whole trilogy I am still missing that depth. I just feel it could have been so much more than it turned out to be.

I am not saying that this book is poorly written, or that it was not interesting enough to keep reading, as there were some sudden twists I did not see coming. Like for example, I knew the Darkling was the villain here, if you are in the book world spoilers are bound to happen from time to time, even if you try to avoid them, like I usually tend to do. What I hadn't seen coming is Baghra breaking the news to Alina, and the real story that came with the revelation was not what I had expected.

Actually, that might have been the point were the book started to move along, a lot faster, we get to see a lot more of the world, learn a lot more about it, the learning curve goes hand in hand with our main character, so there is no broadly explained world, only what we see through Alina her eyes. I think that is why I have been struggling so much with the book, maybe the reluctant hero, is not a perspective I like all that much. While rethinking this, yes I think because I have issues with Alina as a charater that makes it that for me this will never be a 5 star book.

I can already let you know that I did finish the trilogy, and I really want to read King of Scars and Rule of Wolfs, because they are about my favorite character in the whole trilogy Nikolai! After watching the first episode of the tv series, I am alse really interested in picking up Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom. So I guess I am a bit of a fan afterall. I want to add that this book is very well written, I think for me the writing pulled me trough at times. I didn't mean for this review to turn out so critical but this is truely how I felt when reading the book. The first 50 pages were slow, after that it got a lot better and I got really invested in the story. That is a good thing, it made me purchase the other 2 books and finish them as well. So it has a certain addiction to it.

I will leave it at that.