The Bone Season (Tenth Anniversary Edition) by Samantha Shannon

Book Fort Rating: 4.5 Stars

Is it building the Book Fort? Paige Mahoney could tell me she owns the book fort now, and I'd hand her the keys.

Y'all, this love of my life author has done it again.

I am convinced that Samantha Shannon simply cannot write a bad book. I honestly had to take a couple of days to gather my thoughts before sitting down to write this review. Let it be known this is really just a Samantha Shannon stan account parading around as a book review blog in a trench coat.

Firstly: While Shannon's original The Bone Season was a great debut, this author's revised text is a masterpiece all its own. For old fans of The Bone Season, never fear, this rewrite does keep the main story intact. While quotes have changed (and certain scenes have been removed), at its core this is the same story of revolution and a sassy, smart-mouthed protagonist who just doesn't know when to quit. The rewrite offers better clarity into the way clairvoyance works and the orders of clairvoyance, getting rid of a lot of the guesswork original readers did in 2013.

For new readers, this is a story about standing your ground in the face of injustice, found family, and learning to trust yourself above anything (or anyone) else. The story follows Paige Mahoney, an Irish clairvoyant, as she is stolen away from the underworld of London's clairvoyant society to a dystopic camp, where she is commanded to begin training to use her clairvoyant gifts to serve the government she hates most - The Republic of Scion. Along the way, Paige learns who's really running the show behind Scion, and the atrocities that are committed daily to maintain the perfect image of a utopic imperialistic republic.

I find that Shannon's greatest strength in this rewrite is her focus not only on solid, well-constructed writing, but on diversity of characters and experiences. Her characters run the gamut of backgrounds, upbringings, and identities, which is a big change from the 2013 original release. Shannon has talked a lot in the past about trying to better educate herself because of her passion for diversity in novels, and there are clear, big improvements within the rewrite. LGBTQ+ representation was especially apparent in this rewrite, which I highly appreciate as a bisexual reader.

I also think it's worth mentioning that I did feel the rewrite offered deeper character development than in the original version as well. Main characters and secondary characters were fleshed out much more deeply, and I found myself much more attached to characters (and impacted by their fates) than I did when I read the original book way back when.

That all being said, I did feel that the ending to the revised edition felt a bit rushed. This could have been a side effect of me speed reading at 2AM hyped up on caffeine, but certain elements did seem to come out of left field in a way that made me feel I needed to reread some of the ending chapters.

All in all though, I loved returning to this world, and I can't wait to start reading the rewrite of The Mime Order ASAP. If you need a good, dystopic revolution story rooted in facing injustice head-on with a new-found family, maybe consider taking a trip to Scion. After all, there's no safer place to be.