Shadow and Bone

Sitting here in test proctoring hell seems like as good a time as any to write about Leigh Bardugo's Shadow and Bone, which I finished a few days ago and keep forgetting to talk about. (I'm serious about that hell business - this is day 2 of 4 that I will spend locked in this windowless, airless, allergen-full computer lab watching other people take tests. Today, the new torture of heat was added, which is a joy. Seriously, this makes the 5-hour classes I will be attending tonight and tomorrow seem like things to look forward to.)

Anyway, I haven't forgotten to talk about it because it's a bad book - far from it. It was a book that I didn't want to put down. Set in a world that seems to be parallel to our own (Alina's Ravka is apparently a bizarro-world counterpart to our Russia) in a way similar to what Philip Pullman did with Lyra's world - a little more old-fashioned and filled with magic, but still fairly recognizable. Where Pullman has armored bears and Dust and daemons, Bardugo has the Grisha, a group gifted from birth with the power to master a branch of the small science. They are led by the Darkling, the most powerful of the Grisha. Alina is introduced to us as pretty much the polar opposite of the Grisha - orphaned, poor, weak, and wholly without confidence. It should be obvious to anyone who has ever read a book before that Alina will discover her heretofore untapped Grisha powers, and at a crucial moment. The book is about her coming to terms with those powers, learning to harness them, and discovering that things in Ravka are not always as they appear.

I enjoyed the world that Bardugo has created here and I look forward to the expansion of that world in the next two books of this trilogy (of course it's a trilogy, because why write a fantastic stand-alone book when you could write three or four or ten books?). I also loved the way that Bardugo explored the differences between the different classes in Ravka. Alina, having grown up poor, recognizes instantly that the wealthy put on this show of being very down to earth and in touch with the simpler life (the Grisha wear peasant-style clothing under their robes, they're encouraged to eat hearty peasant food for breakfast) when they are, of course, thoroughly out of touch with the day-to-day life of the poor.

I did have one big complaint: Bardugo relies too heavily on epiphanies. Alina doesn't make slow progress with her powers - she has an epiphany, and then she's awesome! Later on in the book, there is a similar moment that, without spoiling anything, really zapped the tension from a moment that was previously filled with it. If an author is going to put a character in a situation that seems impossible, I want the extrication process to blow me away, to be something I couldn't have come up with. I can still recommend this book whole-heartedly, but I hope in the next installment, there is a little more creative problem-solving.