Paige Mahoney is 19 and part of the criminal underworld. She is a dream-walker, able to enter people's minds and roam around. Within a few pages Paige is in trouble.
Picked up by guards while travelling on a train, she destroys one of them with her mind.
Soon she has been apprehended and transported to a penal colony for unnaturals in the town that was once Oxford.
That's where Paige learns the truth. Scion is a puppet power controlled by a race of ruthless clairvoyant aliens called the Rephaim, who are intent on taking over the world.
She is to be trained to help destroy their enemy, the flesh-eating Emim, and becomes the possession of the enigmatic Warden, soon finding that, despite herself, she is attracted to and protective of him.
Shannon has a big world to introduce us to while also keeping the action humming along. Poor Paige is drugged, battered and bruised as she tries to survive the Rephaim and plot her escape. At times it gets confusing since there are a host of new terms as well as characters to get to grips with.
Had I realised there was a nine-page glossary at the back it might have helped me better keep up with the mollishers, amaurotics, mime-lords, harlies and spools.
The Bone Season is the first of a proposed series of seven novels.
That's a big story arc to build and quite a commitment for such a young writer. Film rights have been sold and she's being touted as the new JK Rowling.
If the pressure of all that doesn't finish her off it will be interesting to see how Shannon's style matures as she does and where she takes Paige.
Yes, it's derivative and the hype may have over-sold it, but still this is a story with heaps of potential for drama and romance.
The first in any series of fantasy books always has to be heavily expositional and hopefully, now she has coloured in the background, Shannon will start developing plot and relationships and show fans of the genre the extent of her capability.
