If you haven't read this book, you don't truly know what addiction is. A debut novel that makes the NYT bestselling list? That has to be for something.
The once-world's greatest nation, Ravka, with all of its mountains, cities, legends and of course, its magical Second Army, the Grisha, has been cut off from the world outside by the Shadow Fold, a cloud of impenetrable darkness, inside which there are the most unthinkable of abominations, is now slowly - very slowly - crumbling at its foundations, and nobody on the inside really seems to care, for the world outside is progressing and they're stuck, literally, on the inside.
Ravka is defended by The Grisha, soldiers of the Second Army, Masters of the Small Science, basically an Elite Ravkan League; its pride, that consists of the Corporalki, (healers and heartenders) Etherealki (summoners) and the Materialki, (fabrikators) led by the most powerful of them and the only one that can summon Darkness, The Darkling. Everybody wants in, well, who wouldn't, for they have the best everything - they're admired and even feared.
The tale is centered on two orphans (a boy and a girl, obviously), who grew up together in the same falling-apart-estate, Kermazin. Both rather odd children that found solace in each other because of what is described as 'easiness to have things in common, especially when you are a young child trying to get through rejection so early on in your life.' It's about how, now some 15 years later, she finds herself on a very different path than that of the person that she has known all her life - the one she can't live without - the, well, social butterfly and the one always on the outside looking in! Or at least, that's how it starts…
With an unexplainably horrifying mass murder in a failed cross over the Shadow Fold, the last thing the girl can remember is pain and death all around her and then a blinding white light, in the heavy weight of the darkness the surrounds her, which is when her life changes!
At this point, I must ask you a question… If you were taken away from everything you know and put into a world that everybody dreams of, a world that, obviously, not many people have; a world that you could never possibly dream of fitting into, but still want to, so SO bad, what would you do?
She is Alina Starkov, the Sun Summoner, the second most powerful Grisha; the first ray of hope that a nation divided and falling apart in the New Age now has- no longer a lonely orphan that could never quite fit in.
Shadow and Bone is one of those books that keeps you entwined till the very end, a book that you can't put down, no matter what.
It's a book about home - about wanting to go back but where do you go, when there is nowhere. It's about something, and someone, that can be so new and glamorous and shining and different, that you forget to look past all the glitter to see something that is not at all what you first saw. It's about that one person whom you never want to leave you. It's about change (and embracing it) and about (whom to) trust. It's about life itself, and about how even though everything around you has changed, can you do truly do the same?
It's a girl's story who is pulled out of one world and put into another, one all sparkles and another quite the opposite, both of which she can't seem to fit into. It's the type of story that I've always been a sucker for, but has much MUCH more.
To say more than I have, would be to ruin it, but READ it or you're seriously missing out!
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