May 9

May 9 The Dark Mirror (The Bone Season, #5)

About the book

Author: Samantha Shannon
Publisher: Bloomsbury

More info:
The StoryGraph | Goodreads
Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the review.

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My Review

I’m going to review this book without any spoilers for the first four, because I know many people (like me) are coming to The Bone Season for the first time now that the looooong long wait between books four and five is over. This is the best non-romantasy fantasy series I have read in a very LONG time, and I desperately want you to read it.

The background info: Shannon published the first Bone Season book in her early 20s and then quickly published the next three. Then she took a break to write other awesome stuff like The Priory of the Orange Tree and its companions. In all that intervening time, she matured and became an even better writer. So before returning to write TBS5, she went back and fully revised the first four. I started my TBS journey earlier this year with those “Author’s Preferred Texts,” as they’re called, and I loved them. But I was still excited to get to this book, because it’s the first one where she’s fully planned, plotted, and drafted it from scratch using her current skillset — she has picked this series back up at the height of her powers.

In a publishing landscape obsessed with romantasy, this feels like a refreshing return to dystopian fantasy being what it is meant to be and not trying to be anything else. (That’s not to say there’s no romance — almost all fantasy has at least one love story in the plot — but it took MANY books for the slow-burn central romance to pay off here [and OMG WHEWWWWW was it worth it].)

I cannot emphasize enough how good this series is. Paige is an incredible protagonist, Warden is perfect, and Jaxon is possibly one of the best characters I’ve ever read. All these books, but especially The Dark Mirror, are expertly plotted and paced. I laughed and I cried (and cried and cried — HOW COULD YOU, SAMANTHA!).

Here’s hoping now that Shannon is happy with the first five books, we get books six and seven QUICKLY. I will be at those midnight release parties!