Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo

Soooo I’m ashamed to say I’ve spent a fair amount of time on BookTok and BookTube recently. Admittedly, it’s probably part of the reason that I haven’t posted in so long. Dear reader, if you have no idea what BookTok or BookTube is, just know that it is made up of seemingly endless horny, fantasy-reading women. It’s not a bad thing, but it is most certainly a thing. This book had been recommended by a handful of such people, so I thought I’d dip my toe in the fantasy waters and see what all the fuss was about. I chose this one in particular because it recently became a Netflix series. I love to read books and then analyze the way in which the adaptations are different. This story centers on Alina, an orphaned map-maker who finds herself suddenly in possession of power she did not know she had. This power thrusts her into a high society and away from her childhood best-friend Mal, who she secretly pines over, and into the hands of the Darkling, the king’s right hand man.

Because this was a BookTok recommendation, I was expecting things to be a little more….. risque than my usual reads. It was halfway through the book, when things started to get a bit steamy and were abruptly stopped (by which I felt alarmingly cheated) that it dawned on me that the book is YA. I found myself surprised by the target audience. Mostly because most YA I’ve read seems to have has a fair amount of patronization/watered-down-ness seemingly inherent when old adults? Non-young-adult people write YA. This book really did not have that. Alina is not so much an ingenue as she is a young woman who just keeps being interrupted at the point of things heating up.

While the book does rely heavily on the classic “suddenly-special-girl-has-to-save-the-world” and “oh-no-I-love-my-childhood-sweetheart-but-also-have-the-tinglies-for-the-new-broody-boy” YA shenans, they are classics for a reason and admittedly I still enjoyed this book and how those cliches fit into it. Coupled with the fact that the book is nearly a decade old, I can forgive this book it’s tropey sins. Overall, I would say it is a good escapist read. I will probably be checking out the other two in the series.