Sombra e Ossos

This story is about Alina Starkov, an orphan from Ravka who grew up in a Keramzin orphanage founded by Duke Keramsov. Her childhood best friend, Malyen Oretsev AKA Mal, grew up alongside her and they share a close bond which continues when the two go on to join the First Army. He joins and becomes a highly skilled and peerless tracker, whereas she assumes the role of mapmaker.

The country of Ravka is at war with neighbors to its north, Fjerda, and its south, Shu Han. Ravka is also split into two as a result of an unfortunate event hundreds of years ago resulting in a massive abyss of shadow and darkness splitting the two parts of the country known as The Fold or The Unsea.

During an excursion into The Fold, Alina discovered when under severe duress that she was able to summon the power of light. It was this single event that changed the course of her life forever, as she would discover that such a powerful summoner had long been awaited as a potential means to put an end to The Fold once and for all to re-unite Ravka. She was immediately whisked off to Ravka's capital, Os Alta, and to the Little Palace to meet other powerful Grisha as well as The Darkling, a powerful dark summoner who had been waiting for the emergence of a Sun Summoner for some time to help with the destruction of The Fold, or so he claimed...

Alright, so... confession time right off the bat! I've read Shadow & Bone after watching the Netflix series and after reading the Six of Crows duology, so I am familiar with the story and how it develops and I'm familiar with the Grishaverse as a whole. This certainly makes this first installment a little hard to judge in a vacuum.

The Shadow and Bone TV series seasons 1 & 2 were EPIC. Like, I cannot get over how good they were. In the show, however, they did blend in elements from the Six of Crows duology into the story of this trilogy and it worked a treat to keep up the action and to bring some very interesting characters into the mix, which was great for the TV audience.

If you've read Six of Crows and/or maybe seen the TV series and are expecting Shadow & Bone the book to be anything like it then the book might disappoint you a little. This novel was more slow-paced and focused exclusively on Alina's story and the setting of Ravka, as you'd expect, and the characters here aren't written with the same spice and pizzazz as those featuring in SoC. It felt very much like Bardugo was finding her footing in this opening novel to the whole universe and stuck to the safety of common fantasy character tropes and leaned on those foundations a little heavily, complete with customary "mean girl" Zoya whose existence seemed purely to be a bitch to Alina with little other redeeming qualities.

Tropey characters aside, the formula was a good one and the world building and setup in this first novel in the series I found to be excellent. Bardugo did a good job of making the world feel unique and intriguing, as well as creating a Grisha magic system of elemental manipulation/"Small Science" whose practitioners specialized in various schools of magic and wore clothing to match their designation. I found this to be a neat take on magic and this book very much set up the foundations of what is to come later in the Grishaverse novels.

The book was a fast read, although the pacing was a little slow in parts and we were only limited to Alina's perspective throughout the whole book, which I thought was a bit of a missed trick. It would have been very interesting to see the perspectives of Mal and The Darkling, at least, too and would have made for an opportunity to perhaps develop those characters a little more than we saw here.

I enjoyed the emotional moments and there are definitely times in the book which will tug on your heartstrings! You really do feel the bond between Alina and Mal and I can't wait to see how that develops in the next two novels. This is something I felt even more in the books than the TV show, as there were a couple more chapters in the book dedicated to Alina and Mal's time together and struggle throughout the main quest they faced which were only touched upon in the TV series. This is why I love reading books behind a show I enjoyed, as they provide more depth than is usually possible to show on screen.

If you struggled a little with this and found it a little slow paced or the characters a little one dimensional and tropey, I can see why but I'd implore anyone to continue the series and check out Bardugo's other works in the Grishaverse, namely the Six of Crows duology. This was literally the foundation that kicked off a truly epic franchise that is worthy of the praise it receives from fantasy enjoyers, and I can see how Bardugo evolved as an author throughout to create one of my favorite fantasy series to date.

I shall be moving on to reading Siege and Storm, which is the second book in this trilogy.