Shadow and Bone - Leigh Bardugo

"Surrounded by enemies, the once-great nation of Ravka has been torn in two by the Shadow Fold, a swath of near impenetrable darkness crawling with monsters who feast on human flesh. Now its fate may rest on the shoulders of one lonely refugee.

Alina Starkov has never been good at anything. But when her regiment is attacked on the Fold and her best friend is brutally injured, Alina reveals a dormant power that saves his life—a power that could be the key to setting her war-ravaged country free. Wrenched from everything she knows, Alina is whisked away to the royal court to be trained as a member of the Grisha, the magical elite led by the mysterious Darkling.

Yet nothing in this lavish world is what it seems. With darkness looming and an entire kingdom depending on her untamed power, Alina will have to confront the secrets of the Grisha . . . and the secrets of her heart."

You know, I've wondered whether I would fall into the camp of gushing, never-ending love for this book... or find myself sat sipping kvas with the other sceptics and laughing over the preposterous idea that we could ever get drunk on it. I was prepared for it to go either way. However, I find myself uselessly sitting somewhere in the middle twiddling my thumbs and pondering all the different things I liked but didn't love and disliked but didn't hate.

I didn't like Alina that much. She was okay. She was fine, but you know something is wrong when the heroine is merely "okay" and "fine". I found her too much on the wimpy side for my liking, she was too eager to play the damsel in distress on multiple occasions. She could also seem slightly stupid.
You don't mouth off to the second most powerful person in the kingdom who you believe is capable of evil. You just don't. It does not come across as sassy, just stupid.

Anyway, then she finds a super unique power that apparently no one realized she had. She finds herself in a boarding school/king's court full of mean girls and even has several makeovers! Along the way, she unexpectedly becomes a fighting badass! Then there are two boys swooning over her! Wait what??


The one thing that did excite me was the attempt at drawing inspiration from the Russian culture, it could have set it apart from the other generic stories for the largely Western-centric crowd but even someone with a basic knowledge of Russia could spot a few problems.

1. You have to drink a barrel of Kvas to be drunk on it.
2. Alina Starkov's second name is masculine. It should be Starkova.
3. Morozova, who does have an appropriate feminine last name has a masculine first name which is never used for girls - Ilya.

Now, there were good things about this book, too, don't get me wrong. It was a very easy read in a decent prose. It flowed well. The love triangle died quickly and there was an actual plot and not just lovesick gazing. The reader felt engaged and interested and the plot twist, I didn't see coming. The love interest was actually a rather decent guy who is not tortured by his dark past which made a nice change.

However it is a light fantasy, limited world-building, heavily diluted by romance and very limited violence from a group of people that are supposedly hard-core warriors. Come on, some of them are even called Heart Renders and they don't rend one heart!!

Age rating 13+. Mild making out.

 

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