SEPT - The Bone Season

September review for the Eclectic Reader's Book Challenge 2013: The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon, 2013. [Dystopia category]

It's a rare moment when I buy hardcover full-price. Shiny, intriguing covers help.

Wiling away the hours in our newest hip bookstore last month, I was trying desperately to find a book that would fit my dystopia category. I went through classics lists on the internet, debated H.G. Wells and Isaac Asimov, but ultimately went outside to sit on the curb, anxious and tomeless, redoubling my internet efforts on my tiny phone screen. On a whim, I had picked up the IndiePicks! newsletter for the month as I was leaving Literati, and I thumbed through it looking for catchwords that might possibly mean "containing post-apocalyptic oppressive society." The stark blue cover of The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon struck me, even in thumbnail form, and as I read through the blurb I became more and more excited about it. Luckily, I hadn't gone but four steps from Literati, so I turned around and walked back inside and on whim, bought a $26-hardcover-new-realease from a 22-year-old British author and walked back out. (There aren't words to explain how rarely I do such a thing. I suffer from a double dose of inherited Jewish stinginess and buyer's anxiety, so such a splurge really spoke to me.) Immediately I sat down and started to read in the sun, hoping for anything to make my soul thrum with excitement again. It had been a while.

At first glance The Bone Season seems to be a typical sci-fi concept, the story of a singular individual built into an oppressive world whose skills make it dangerous for her to be there at all. (One girl in all the world, anyone?) Add some clairvoyance and a little bit of 1984 cross-bred with V For Vendetta and you've pretty much got The Bone Season. Paige Mahoney is a teenage clairvoyant living in 2059 London, a city that is now taken over by the terrifyingly closed-minded Scion (haha clairvoyance pun...sorry guys). Paige is a special kind of clairvoyant called a dreamwalker which essentially allows her spirit to leave her body to interact with the aether around her and even the minds of other people. This rare talent makes her a hot commodity in the rebel underground where she is employed by a rather pompous clairvoyant named Jaxon Hall. Her talent is untrained, though, and when forced into a corner Paige accidentally uses her power and kills two underguards, making her even more Most Wanted than usual. Her attempts to fly under the radar fail and she is captured and taken to what is essentially a concentration camp for her kind, called Sheol 1, built in the ruins of what used to be Oxford, and it is ruled by alien creatures called the Rephaim. Paige, being a special someone, is taken under the command of Warden, the blood consort and one who rarely consorts with humans. Isolated and confused, Paige has to learn to either adapt to this crushing new lifestyle or own her abilities enough to break herself and her newfound friends of the compound, all the while being tormented with gossip of faceless monsters, the Emim, who prowl just outside Sheol 1, snacking on a human limb here and some Rephaim blood there. Most of the story takes place within Sheol 1 and follows Paige's day-to-day traversal of her new life. Though the phraseology at times seemed a little too quaint and the final battle came rather quickly after so many pages of painstakingly detailed mind-jaunts, the novel as a whole was more than satisfying to me, due largely to the snarky female protagonist.

Paige is strong and bullheaded and ultimately very flawed, but her imperfections possibly make it easier for the reader to take her story as something to be heeded. The budding interest between Paige and her captor is interesting but also takes a backseat: it is not the point of the whole frame, as it would be in Twilight or some such work. Some critics have disparaged Paige as too self-absorbed and inconsiderate of others, obsessed with her gift but unwilling to push her limits, but I think the very fact that she has all these problems allow her to be a real human being, not a one-track-mind cyborg (*ahem* Bella) who can do nothing except chase a horribly toxic relationship with a horribly unavailable and dangerous individual. Our Paige is young and she messes up (a lot). She gets angry at Warden (not that he doesn't entirely deserve it) and gets into fights and spins out of control as she flails against the huge dystopian force that is Scion London.

Trying to find a book to read for dystopia was really interesting because it brought up a lot of questions and observations about the genre. Originally, I thought about doing Ender's Game for this month's category, but when I read the internet's thoughts on the matter, it seemed as if Ender was widely not considered dystopic because it takes place during the end of the world as the characters know it, rather than after. I feel that this is an unfairly specific restriction on dystopia because one could argue that it is never really the end of THE world but rather the end of A world. In this respect, I think Ender's Game could've worked nicely but I'm glad I chose The Bone Season because there's something about near-future radical regime shift stories that speaks to me lately. The Bone Season is at its core about exclusion. Parallels can be drawn to Holocaust tropes ("a humane means of removing clairvoyants from ordinary society" p402) or anti-gay propaganda (the pamphlet Jaxon writes is called On The Merits of Unnaturalness) or even vampire stories (at one point Warden drinks Paige's blood to restore him after he rebelliously gets his ass shredded by an Emim, not to mention that the Rephaim sleep during the day). But Shannon does not pedestal any of these threads, does not allow any singular one to become a watchword for her story. In this way, as well, I think it is derivative and silly to compare her to "the next J.K. Rowling." Allow her to be her own phenomenon, should her work deserve it. I myself am looking forward to seeing that it does.

Charts! I love charts!

The Bone Season is being hailed as everything from the next J.K. Rowling to the next Stephanie Meyer, and the reader reviews are just as varied. I truly enjoyed this book, thought it was new and full and a good first start. There were of course some failings, it being Shannon's first time out of the gate and all, but I don't think any of the comparisons both critics and publishers are making are fair to her--or anyone's--nascent talent. Being compared to such publishing powerhouses could automatically stunt Shannon's growth under all the pressure such completely different stories unfairly place upon her. To me, there were many things that were inspiring about this book, first and foremost that Samantha Shannon is 22 and published, an beacon of hope to me as an aspiring 22 year old writer who still only writes on her lunch break at the coffee shop. Her main character is a strong young woman who claws her way out of the world that was forced upon her. And her imagination is to die for. Being a lover of words, I was so excited to have a glossary in the back and a hierarchy of (vaguely defined) types of clairvoyants in the front. While many critics raked Shannon across the coals for "info-dumping" and unintelligible language, my heart leapt at the challenge of understanding not only this new world but the way it describes itself. I have been looking for a new world to jump into lately, and I think Samantha Shannon's The Bone Season just might do the trick.

Sleepy Hollow (2013): Meet Ichabod Crane with a Backbone

what a progression, huh?

The new Sleepy Hollow premiered on Fox tonight, created by sci-fi bigwigs Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman. I've always loved Sleepy Hollow, from the bumbling Ichabod in the animated version to the screamy-fainty big-eyed Johnny Depp in Tim Burton's version. This sort of dark fantasy has always intrigued me, the beauty of it paired with the mystery of the unknown. I've read a lot of little tumblr review blurbs about the show to try to sort through how I feel about this new show, and a lot of it I've read from both camps is right in line with how I'm feeling. Mostly, I am intrigued, though, and that intrigue stems from all the threads Orci and Kurtzman are pulling in to shake up the story: some Revelations prophesy, a witchcraft undercurrent to everything you know about history, time-travel thrusting an ordinary human to a still-ordinary-but-different world (albeit 250 years in the future), among other things.

First of all, the main players. Abbie Mills, Ichabod Crane, the Headless Horseman, Katrina Crane--even the ones they killed off in the first episode (sorry, spoilers...). The relationships are well-developed and well-executed for the pilot of a new show, and enough of a plot surfaces to drive certain ones together and others apart. Abbie makes me me happy at my core, a strong [minority] woman in the lead role, in a place of [relative] power, who makes her own decisions and isn't obviously sexualized from the first second. The relationship established between her and Ichabod right away is one of understanding, of being an outsider, of being made to feel small without anything you can do to stop it. It is not romantic, it is not her being saved by him or swept off her feet She is confident in her capability, even when faced with things that shake her to her core, make her remember the day that broke a part of her. This man who has had such a history of unsurety and doubt, Ichabod Crane, finally has a backbone. He doesn't bumble like the animated one, and he isn't a scream away from a faint like Johnny Depp. He is impressively cavalier about accepting his fate, all the while adapting to 21st-century sarcasm while devoting himself to the task at hand, but he can't figure out how to open a car door. He's pretty scruffy and attractive, there's no doubting that, but somehow he was written with an actual personality to go with it! Flaws and everything! Even being supernaturally tied to a big scary axe-wielding mystery man doesn't seem to phase him. Granted, he is told that in a dream by his assumed-to-be-dead lovely wife Katrina. A strong, powerful GORGEOUS witch with bitchin red hair. She was, obviously, burned at the stake for witchcraft shortly after Ichabod "died" and is somehow still playing games that no one knows the rules to except for her and a few select members of different covens. I've heard angry hard-core feminist rants about her boobs being pretty prominent all the time but hey, 1780s fashion, amirite? A good décolletage was a girl's best friend, especially as a means of manipulation, and I am sure Katrina Crane was no stranger to getting her way by any means necessary. She was the one who cast the spell that bound her lover to the Headless Horseman, after all. Speaking of said Horseman, he is probably the most interesting twist on the old mythos: Death itself come again as one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, and Sleepy Hollow is his battleground. Not to mention the fact that he's actually pretty good with an assault rifle.

The stories were made better by the cinematography, the general feel of the show. Even the corniest concept can be made great when treated with the right respect. The colors are brilliant and there is a really interesting use of camera angles, especially when heads are involved--or rather, camera perspectives. In one such moment, a beheading occurs and the camera is seemingly looking out of the eyes of the beheaded as it falls to the ground. I'm interested to see how they'll deal with the hell-characters aspect of the first season. The feel of the show was very similar to Grimm and Supernatural, with a touch of old X-Files believer/non-believer dichotomy.

The thing that I am nervous about was the heavy-handed insinuation of the general layout of the show: "Two witnesses brought together for a seven-year period of tribulations" -- I am nervous about this show getting ahead of itself before it figures out how to grow up and not be a corny little knockoff show that's too full of itself. However, I do enjoy the plan because it implies that there is, you know, a plan. . . this shouldn't end up like Lost that forgot what the hell it was doing by season 4. I am looking forward to following this show, if not religiously then academically, if you'll excuse the turn of phrase. There's the historical aspect that I like a lot, and the fictionalization of certain moments and persons from history itself really tickles my fancy. There is a beautiful use of sarcasm and fish-out-of-water humor, and a refreshing number of sassy remarks. But really, in the end, it just comes down to this:

I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE.

Find a spot where you are comfortable waiting

When I was talking to my family's financial advisor earlier this summer, he said something that struck me. He said that this is a hugely important transitional period in my life and if I don't know what I'd like to do yet, I should "find a spot where I am comfortable waiting." It struck me because I really think I have for the moment. I got this new promotion at the café, I'm writing more, applying to jobs; I have an amazing relationship with my boyfriend and my parents, I have a good new place to live, and a solid schedule to keep myself in check. The future is uncertain and scary but I am learning to cope, learning to write and get it out, while still allowing myself small happinesses. I have found my spot to be comfortable.