Shadow and Bone (The Shadow and Bone Trilogy #1)

I ordered the hardcover copy of this book and I was really excited to see the beautiful cover art just to find a Netflix advertisement permanently attached to the cover. At first I thought it was a sticker but no. They printed a netflix advertisement for the adaptation of the book on the cover. I really care about keeping my books nice, especially when I like the cover art. No where in the product description does it warn that the cover art is marred like this.

Plain girl learns she’s the chosen one. She goes into a magic school, has classes, deals with snobs. Becomes powerful and beautiful, but spends most of her time anguished over a love triangle.

This is a rehash of many other books, nothing new here.

It feels like half the book is about how people look, and only the beautiful people matter. Such a sad and stupid stereotype.

Set, and written, before the Six of Crows duology. If youre going to read this trilogy, read it first or not at all. Its not so much that Six of Crows spoils you for plot (though it does just a little) but more that Six of Crows will spoil you for richness of characters and depth of plot. Shadow & Bone just feels lacking in comparison – a little too plain, far too cliche, a little empty on characters, and far too short. Six of Crows simply sets reader expectations too high – better to start here and work your way forward with the authors experience level.

I wont be buying the rest of this trilogy, but rather waiting for the author to write new works.

Ms. Bardugo really has a talent with storytelling mixed in with magic and humor. I love the universe she created with its Russian words, background, culture. The harshness of being an orphan, the luxuries of the Court all really come together in a rich fantasy oil painting. Not too much detail, not too much magic theory, not too much dread and despair. It was an easy read.

That aside, I couldn’t really like the characters. I thought I liked the diamond-in-the-rough heroine but she never really pulled through to get her act together until the very end of this novel. She was constantly being pushed, shoved, led by others. She was easily deceived, and deceived even herself. You would think that after all this time she would figure out who she was and what she wanted. She is no longer a child but she is constantly looking to others to give her the answers.

The character development was really a mixed bag of “aha!” moments the author drops like candies on the floor. No real warning, just suddenly the heroine discovers why she’s so brilliant (no pun intended), the hero suddenly decides he loves her, and the villain whom I was really cheering for went from a multi-dimensional puzzle box to a textbook villain with no soul. Ugh. Disappointment central.

The ending wrapped up so quickly it literally took half a chapter and one afterward to wrap it up. One moment it was all confrontation tension, the next, a miraculous resolution because the heroine just figured it all out. The problem with the big reveal is that she never really cared about anything. Not her work. Not her co-workers. Not her life. Not even her health/appearance. She lived her entire life just numb; without hope or joy, just pining after a childhood friend. She obsessed about her childhood friend as if her universe revolved around him, and despite everything that happens to her and everything she’s discovered about herself she still clings to him in the end even though we were supposed to believe she completely broke free of that mold many chapters ago.

So she makes a choice, willing to sacrifice all else, including the friends she didn’t think she could make and innocent people, to get her HEA. What makes her so different from the enemy, then? In the next book I’m supposed to believe she wants to fight a madman and save the country (she never really care for or fit in anywhere) and its people (she never really had any connection to)? Yeah, I’m thinking I’ll just let her do that without me. I’m done Alina. Have fun with that.

The novel was rather short, as well. I think all three could really be reduced to two books, but for the greed of the publisher, we’re forced to pay a tall price three times. The first 70% of this book was decent, but I’ll save my money and read something else.

It had the bones of a good book, but it desperately needed fleshing out and maybe a reality check.
The meat of the story was, hilariously, just a boarding school drama. Even though the Grisha are supposedly the King’s most elite soldiers, apparently they don’t have anything better to do but gossip about each other’s clothes and about who’s shagging who in between classes.

Genya and the Darkling were the only remotely multifaceted/interesting characters. The others were just cardboard cutouts. Alina and Mal included.
I liked Mal at first, and his unbreakable friendship with Alina that kept toeing the line to be something more. But then he disappears for most of the book and when he returns he’s devolved into a bland and broody love interest.

Alina’s sole defining trait is her unfailingly low self esteem. Aside from that she’s a blank slate While I can understand why low self esteem might be appropriate for the target audience and as the starting point for a coming of age story, it isn’t something that’s enjoyable for me to read personally. It’s especially grating when that’s the literal only glimmer of personality Alina had. The payoff at the end simply wasn’t good enough to sit through her whining and second guessing all through the novel.

Speaking of payoffs. I don’t want to spoil anything but that has to be the cheapest handwavey loophole I’ve read in quite some time. There is *nothing* set up previously to support that or to suggest that Grisha magic works that way.

All grumping aside I’ll probably read the next one as well. It reads cleanly and doesn’t take too much energy. It’s nice mindless fluff if you need to wind down.

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