Book Review - Leigh Bardugo's Shadow and Bone
Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo
Published by: Henry Holt and Co.
Publication Date: June 5th, 2012
Format: Hardcover, 368 Pages
Rating: ★★★★★
To Buy (Different edition then one reviewed)
Alina and Mal only have each other. Orphaned in the wars they grew up looking to each other for everything. Now they are in the first army together, Mal's a tracker and Alina's a cartographer. But little does Mal know Alina's true feelings for him. The way her heart thumps when he's near or how she worries that they might be parted. Their parting is near at hand. The land of Ravka is divided by a darkness, a nothing. The capital is cut off from the ports and the country has been vulnerable for hundreds of years while creatures roam the blackness killing those who try to cross it. Mal and Alina are about to attempt the crossing with their units; only everything goes wrong. They are attacked and it looks as if they are both going to die, but then a light as bright as the sun shines out and cuts the creatures down. Little does Alina realize that the light emanated from her. Being called before the leader of the second army, the Darkling, Alina thinks that for some reason she is in trouble, but doesn't know why she is brought before the Grisha. The Grisha are masters of the small science, innate abilities in them that classify them as Corporalki, Etheralki, or Materialki, with powers ranging from stopping a human heart to metallurgy. Summoning the Sun means that Alina is an Etheralki who somehow avoided detection. Finding out that she isn't in trouble but is in fact what their country has been praying for since the arrival of this dark rift puts pressure beyond measure on Alina. Not only is she trying to forget the pain of being separated from Mal, she's dealing with the cosseted little world of backbiting Grishas, all while coming to grips with a power she never knew she had and hoping that it's all just a big mistake. Yet what if the Darkling has a different purpose in mind for Alina's powers than banishing the darkness? Will she be able to withstand his magnetism and the allure of life at court and find her way back to Mal?
It should go without saying that I obviously had to re-read this entire series before the Netflix adaptation hit the small screen. I wanted to reimmerse myself in the Grishaverse before it became something more, something else. Plus with the way the world has been it's a comfort to sink back into a series where you know what to expect. There's a reason I reread Harry Potter so much. This time around I wasn't thinking so much about the series being Tamora Pierce meets Buffy meets Harry Potter meets The Hunger Games meets The Neverending Story meets on and on and on with Malcolm Reynolds by another name. Instead I enjoyed it fully on it's own terms, even with some of the bizzarre naming choices which I hope are jokes. Fjerda HAS to be a Swedish Chef joke right? Børk Børk Børk! But it's the subtler undertones of Mother Russia that drew me in again and that coheres the book, versus the more absurd elements (Børk!) The mirroring of the political situation of Russia at the beginning of the last century was spot on. Strip out all the Grishas and the magic, take out an evil nothing and what have we got? We have a country with a widening gap between the haves and the have nots. The King is just a figurehead that no one respects and has a mysterious religious leader as counsel. The power of the country resides in the army and out of this a megalomaniacal leader will take the country's reigns for his own will. So the Darkling is Stalin or Lenin, with the Apparat as Rasputin. Yet by seeing this through a filter of fiction and fantasy it somehow makes it more real than less real. When we travel with Alina from her life of drudgery in the army to her life of splendor in the Little Palace we get to see in stark relief the widening gap between the haves and the have nots. Sometimes it takes another medium to filter events for us to get at the truth of something, and that is what Leigh Bardugo has done in Shadow and Bone. It might not be perfect (Børk), but it is memorable and echoes down the ages to our shared history.
THIS is THE SHOW I've been waiting all year for. Heck, YEARS for, so yes, I might be a tad more critical because I just re-read all the books in the Grishaverse and therefore little things were getting to me amongst the greatness of this epic, like I do not believe there is any way Zoya would have bangs. Yes, she's a Squaller so she could probably maintain them, perfectly balancing humidity and placement, I just don't think they're Zoya... And yes, I admit I've probably thought about this more than was necessary, but that's just me. The grandeur and the beauty and the bangs are all here on display. This is the epic fantasy we've been needing to purge Game of Thrones out of our system, so STOP comparing it to Game of Thrones! Unless you've read all the books then I'll let you call Zoya Daenerys Targaryen 2.0. But that is all. There is so much they go right in this adaptation. I was so wary of Kaz, Jesper, Inej, Nina, and Matthias being brought forward in time I was shocked how well they fit in, merging the original trilogy and the first duology. This led to some wonderful "what if" scenarios like the Darkling and Kaz meeting in an alley. Kaz's exit was priceless. In fact while I feel the casting was so perfect throughout, hats off to Kit Young, he IS Jesper. I don't know if I've ever seen a book to screen adaptation get something so right. He just doesn't play the character well, he is Jesper! And as for the addition of Milo? Dear saints, I didn't know how much this series needed a goat until it happened! The only real issues I took had to do with budgetary concerns. They used beautiful Eastern European locations in Budapest, but Leigh so lovingly describes the Little Palace in detail I wish they had had the funds to actually build it, or at least the dining hall. Also sometimes the CGI was a little off, especially when Mal and Alina were hunting the stage, Mal himself looked like he was CGI right out of a video game and I was fighting some true uncanny valley issues. So in the end my analysis is, they got in pretty damn right, I just feel like I'm more in the world when I'm reading the books. Which now need a goat.
So Nicola Pagett is a woman unhappy in her marriage and pregnant by a man other than her husband. And no, this isn't season two of Upstairs, Downstairs, this is Anna Karenina. Though you could be forgiven for mistaking one for the other if you took out the fact that I like Karenin far more than I ever liked Lawrence Kirbridge. Moving on, I should put in a train reference here but I'm just not that witty today... Anna Karenina is a classic that I have been meaning to read for forever, have not gotten around to, knew it ended with Anna's death under a train, and eventually just decided to watch the miniseries. Because if there's one thing you can be certain of, this is the definitive adaptation. Yes, there have been many movies, yes, there have been quite a few other television adaptations, but are any of them ten episodes long and bother to included the somnambulist psychic Landau? No they do not! And I'm sorry, but Landau became my favorite character with only a single scene. He's basically Rasputin if he was played by Seth Green. Seriously, one scene just wasn't enough! What I loved about this series is that it makes you believe at all times that it is a true epic, but with a very human element, which is what the best epics are. There's love and betrayal and wonderful snarky society snubs that surely had to inspire Edith Wharton when she sat down to write The Age of Innocence. There's all this great grandness, even the palace from Netflix's recent adaptation of Shadow and Bone gets a look in, but at the end it's about Anna. And my feelings about Anna are complicated. I get the whole, she is trapped by the strictures of society of how a woman should behave and therefore her only option is suicide. But on the other hand, time and time again she is given options, she is given other ways she could live, and she chooses that which will make everyone as miserable as her. She makes people suffer for loving her. She has a slightly justified persecution complex, but one wonders, as she herself does, even if she hadn't found Vronsky was it all just inevitable? Was her life destined for entropy? All I know is that unlike some of the series I've watched for the first time for 
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