Shadow and Bone
The Grishaverse: The Shadow and Bone trilogy, Book 1
Leigh Bardugo
Imprint
Fiction, YA Fantasy
*** (Okay)
DESCRIPTION: Long ago, the nation of Ravka was split in two by a great darkness, the Shadow Fold, creation of a Grisha witch with the power of shadows. Cut off from its coast to the west and hemmed in by sheer mountains and hostile nations, the eastern fragment of Ravka began to wither, and many began to speak ill of the Grishas who brought such horrors, though they still enjoy the protection of the King and the Grisha general of the Second Army, the Darkling, a master of shadows descended from the Fold's creator. He still works to undo his ancestor's creation, but to destroy the Shadow Fold will taken an entirely different kind of power: a Sun Summoner, bringer of light. Only no such Grisha has ever been discovered.
Alina and Malkyen were war orphans, bonding over the shared trauma of their past, a bond that Alina once thought would take them through the rest of their lives. Now they seem to be growing apart. A soldier now, Mal makes many friends and attracts the favors of many more attractive girls, while Alina, a cartographer in training, slips into the background, too plain to be noticed even by her peers. When they're sent across the Shadow Fold for needed supplies from West Ravka, they don't even make it halfway before they're attacked by the monsters of the dead, dark place, the shrieking volcra, who swarm in unprecedented numbers to attack their landskiff... until a great burst of light drives the beasts back. A burst of light that comes from Alina, when she saw Mal attacked by a volcra. The light of the prophesied Sun Summoner.
Whisked away by the Darkling's personal guards and plunged into the isolated domain of the Grishas, Alina is caught up in a whirlwind of politics and expectations, dropped into a world where she feels even more out of place and with a gift she can barely seem to grasp. Suddenly, the forgettable war orphan is the hope of all Ravka and the future of the Grishas... but will she save the nation, or be used to destroy it?
REVIEW: In the interest of full disclosure, I saw the Netflix series before I read this. The series was decent, but I had the distinct feeling that a lot was being compressed and trimmed from the source material, so I picked up the first installment of one of the source books (the other being Six of Crows, set in a different time and with different characters but in the same "Grishaverse") in the hopes that it would fill in some of those rushed holes.
Unfortunately, I think I picked the wrong book.
The world here, loosely inspired by Eastern European influences, isn't that much better drawn than the series, with a lot hinted at but only loosely sketched out and glossed over; the various branches of the Grisha remain maddeningly interchangeable and vague on the page, as do many of the peripheral characters and locations. It doesn't help that Alina is among the most helpless main characters I've read in some time. She exhibits almost no agency or independence, mired in her own stubborn uselessness/helplessness, constantly led around and stumbling and failing and stumbling again, too often being saved by others despite theoretically being one of the most potentially powerful Grishas with a once-in-a-generation power to rival the Darkling. Some lip service is given to her stepping up to her power, but I didn't really feel it, didn't feel the struggle or the fight, didn't experience her growth, but rather was just told about it, if that makes sense. An expected love triangle develops (one of several expected tropes that plays out in expected ways), which does nothing to enhance her agency. (One thing the show definitely got right was switching points of view to include the perspectives of other characters; by being stuck with Alina, who was rather hopelessly over her head the vast majority of the time, I, too, felt lost and helpless and forced to fill in blanks around the edges on my own.) Skirting spoilers, the climax has some unpleasant undertones, though eventually it finally has her stand up (somewhat) and fight back (sort of) on her own, with mixed results.
While I may take a crack at Six of Crows (and will likely watch the next season of the Netflix iteration), I'm not sure I'll follow the rest of Alina's trilogy unless I find credible reports of her growing more interesting, or at least somewhat less helpless as a heroine. She was by far the weakest element of this book, undermining what could have been a decent story and setting.
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