Shadow and Bone: I really just want Crooked Kingdom if that's okay

Shadow and Bone 

 By 

Leigh Bardugo

Wow lots of bone going on down here. Anywho this is apparently the same chick who wrote Six of Crows and I adored that book so I was really looking forward to this one. That being said I literally have zero feelings about this book. Like it was okay and there were some cool bits but mostly I was just kind of . . . there.  Observing. 

So I guess a list is in order because that is what I do when I’ve run out of things to say.

A quick summery I guess

·        So the Grisha are these super magical people that are part of the army.

·        I always try to call them Geisha for some reason

·        Alina the main character turns out to be one of them after she fabulously takes out a bunch of monsters with her special snowflake sunlight powers

·        Apparently she blocked out these special snowflake powers to avoid being separated from Mal her childhood crush

·        I didn’t care about him

·        The only positive thing that came out of him is that I got the Firefly theme song stuck in my head for the rest of the day

·        She’s dragged off to court to train where there is much backstabbing 

.     Plus some regular stabbing

·        And of course she’s paired up with the Darkling

·        He is of course super attractive and can control shadows for some reason

·        Pretty sure that wasn’t in Six of Crows

·        I was kinda bored for most of it

Okay, okay it really wasn’t that bad but after Six of Crows I might have been expecting too much. Compared to the characters in Six of Crows the ones in Shadow and Bone were just kind of forgettable. Like Alina had TWO love interests and I just couldn’t care less about either of them. 

They were both kind of jerks in the beginning actually. But then one of them turned out to be super evil so I kind of just slapped a great big 

award on the other one and turned my brain off for the rest of their romance.

               Actually a lot of people in the end basically betrayed Alina and I was left all alone with her and the sourpuss NOT-JERK.

               Alright I’m kind of bashing the book which is a little bit unfair seeing as how my expectations were so high. There were some good things too. Look I made a list.

               GOOD THINGS

• ·        The dialog was pretty good
• ·        There were many sarcastic quips (I like sarcastic quips)
• ·        The writing was really tight and concise which was nice
• ·        There was actually very little cursing

Look if I haven’t complained about it yet I will at some point. Teen Fiction has a serious problem with gratuitous cursing.

Julie Andrews frowns on such things

 I mean if a writer uses the f-bomb three times in as many sentences then my opinion will go down. At that point it’s completely unnecessary. But Shadow and Bone actually behaved itself which was a nice breath of fresh air from the usual expletive saturated books I usually read.

               I’m actually kind of sad that I didn’t discover the series until after Six of Crow because I think I would have enjoyed it a lot more beforehand. Still it was good enough that I’m definitely getting the second book.