The Bone Season

Introduction

When I go for a walk, I pass a house which has a book exchange cabinet where you can drop books that you probably won't read again and pick up ones that catch your eye.

This was the first one I picked up from there and it is a definite keeper.

I have chosen "Sex Crime" from the film "1984" by the Eurythmics as an appropriate soundtrack for this piece.

I am commenting on this on Seven Days In here

The Bone Season

Yo will have noticed that in my picture there are two bookmarks in the book which is nearly six hundred pages long. I have not finished it yet but I have enough to let you know whether you should get a copy.

When I first opened the book after the introduction, which is almost like a play with characters, localities tyes and the map I shared, I saw what I thought were two chapters "The Bone Season" and "The Pale Dreamer", the first one being 455 pages long.

I find long chapters and sections without breaks difficult to navigate so this did not bode well, I thought. Being a typical man I took no notice of the prequel announcement in a big blue circle on the book cover.

So I started to read and discovered that "The Bone Season" has chapters and is like any normal book. "The Pale Dreamer" is the second part of the physical book, and as I was going through "The Bone Season" I thought maybe I should start "The Pale Dreamer" novella.

150 pages into "The Bone Season" I decided to do that, so that is the reason for the second bookmark. The only reason I have done that before is with reference books.

So on to what it is about, or rather what I have found out so far.

The main protagonist is Paige Mahoney from Ireland, she is a sort of mystic seer and the book is set in an alternate reality where "unnatural" people are clamped down on so have to go underground.

It is set in a near future dystopian United Kingdom starting in 2056, and Paige lives with her father in London but gets involved with a mentalist gang before she is captured by the authorities and exiled to Oxford for training.

The inhabitants of Oxford are not human and treat humans as chattels to enforce their will.

The book has elements of Mervyn Peake's "Gormenghast", William Gibson's "Neuromancer", Philip Pulman's "His Dark Materials", "The Hunger Games" by Suzanne Collins and even elements of Charles Dickens, but it has its own identity.

I still haven't found out how the country came to this and Paige's situation is not good. Her name has been replaced by a number and she is branded, and owned by a trainer/warden who she wants to kill but can't because she knows she will be next.

There are talks of auras and the aether being weaponised and the situation is very dark for everyone.

Conclusion

Thank you for reading and I hope I have given you enough to know whether you want to check this out, but if you do there are five books plus the prequel in the series.

I think my reading may be mapped out for the next six months