(Bloomsbury, $24)
“It’s tricky when a book arrives with such preliminary brouhaha,” said Jane Ciabattari in NPR.org. Even before opening The Bone Season, most readers will know that the novel’s 21-year-old author just graduated from Oxford University, has been hailed as the next J.K. Rowling, and is embarking on a series that will stretch to seven titles and probably launch a major movie franchise. Can any book possibly measure up to such hype? When it’s as “intelligent, inventive, dark, and engrossing” as this one, I’d say that it can.
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Readers with a low tolerance for “paranormal jibber-jabber” won’t get very far, said Ethan Gilsdorf in The Boston Globe. Routine references to things like “dreamwalkers” and “splanchomancy” force us to flip back again and again to a nine-page glossary. “What disrupts the book most often, though, is the author,” said Elizabeth Word Gutting in The Washington Post. Just when the action nears a pulse-pounding height, Shannon swoops in with more “unnecessary, redundant narration.” Such flaws would have been more forgivable if the publisher weren’t trying to establish a new classic. Still, the talent elsewhere on display suggests “just how good Shannon could get in the next six books.” Will she deliver? We’ll have to wait and see.