The boneless novel... Samantha Shannon's The Bone Season

Here is the next review I wrote for my newspaper. It's The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon (two first names. Very confusing). I really did not like this book, but I tried to be kind... Well, not really.

The first in a series of books, The Bone Season is a futuristic dystopian novel written by twenty-two year old Oxford graduate, Samantha Shannon. The year is 2059. In the city of Scion, formerly London, marginalised human beings with clairvoyant powers are forced to live in secret or face elimination by the severe government for being, what they call, “unnatural” and a threat to society.

The heroine, Paige Mahoney, is an unnatural with the power to break into people’s minds. At the age of nineteen, she has fallen into the harsh underworld of Scion, using her ability for financial gain. Paige is captured by the government and is transported to the town that was once Oxford, now Sheoul I. Here lives a society of clairvoyants, in service to a formidable race from another world, the Rephaim, who not only exploit the clairvoyants for their own purposes, but also feed on them.

Imprisoned by her otherworldly keeper, Arcturus Warden, Paige plots to escape from the deadly conditions of Sheoul I. She soon discovers that some of the Rephaim are also discontented with the way of life at Sheoul I, and a rebellion is set in motion.

It is a confusing and exhausting read, and Paige’s motivations are shallow at the best of times. Shannon does little to help usher her readers into the complicated world of Scion, other than including a very disconcerting nine page glossary at the back of the book.

In addition to the film rights being sold, The Bone Season has garnered an extravagant amount of hype as being the next Harry Potter, based on the seven-book deal Shannon has signed with Bloomsbury. However, if comparisons must be made, The Bone Season can be likened to The Hunger Games series.

Undeniably talented at word-building and world-building, Shannon has great potential and big ideas. With six sequels to write and her twenties before her, it is a pity that she has not allowed herself to mature as a writer before embarking on such a monumental undertaking.

South Africans in Space! Alex Latimer's The Space Race

My name is Jeru, and I love books. I also love lemons (not the point, but it matters anyway). I like to write but I love to read more. So, I've combined my love and like to bring you this blog about books that I've read and what I've thought and why you should read more books!

I've read a lot, I have a Masters degree in Classical Civilization, and I've worked for a major international publishing house, so I kind of know what I'm talking about. To start with, here is a review of a South African book I reviewed for my local newspaper. It's The Space Race by Alex Latimer.



Speculative fiction, which includes fantasy, horror, science fiction, as well as alternate history, and post-apocalyptic fiction, among others, is currently experiencing a coming-of-age in South Africa. It is pioneered by writers like Lauren Beukes (Zoo City, The Shining Girls), and publishing houses such as the newly-founded Fox and Raven, which prides itself on specialising in the genre. The latest player on the scene is illustrator and children’s author, Alex Latimer, whose original and enjoyable first novel, The Space Race, adds a touch of the fantastical into the ordinary world, to address socio-political issues. The Space Race is crisp, fast-paced, funny and sincere. Latimer uses a ridiculous situation to comment on the people and the nature of the apartheid regime.

In The Space Race, set in 2013, the world’s eyes are on South Africa after an unauthorised nuclear blast take places outside Upington, at a secret apartheid government nuclear testing site called Vastrap. Much to the distress of the Americans and Russians, the blast launches a spacecraft carrying four Afrikaners destined for a distant and habitable moon. With next to nothing known about Vastrap and the space pioneers, journalist Greg Hall is hired to piece together the mystery of how two sisters from Kimberly and two engineers became the first humans to colonise space. While scanning the detonation site for clues, he finds a man, burned by the blast but still alive, who has the information Greg needs, but also an agenda of his own. Greg tends to the man’s wounds in exchange for the exhilarating back-story, about people left so damaged and hopeless by life on earth that they must make a fresh start on an entirely different planet.

Latimer himself has described his novel as, ‘an easy read about weird stuff,’ and although the truth in his statement is evident in the ironic tone of the book and the many hilarious South Africanisms, The Space Race is also existential and thought-provoking. It is a story of hope and what it means to be human.

Hot on the heels of Latimer’s debut comes humankind’s milestone in space exploration; Voyager 1 has left the solar system. Not only does this prove that Latimer’s concept of humans colonising space is not as unbelievable as it may once have been, it also shows that his work is exceptionally relevant.

a capital offense

to uppercase letters,

i reject you (plural), capital letters. i think you are overrated, overestimated and overvalued. i can differentiate between my proper nouns and all my other words adequately without your help. i don't need you. not for the first letter of my every sentence, not for emphasis, and certainly not even for the the nominative form of the singular first-person pronoun.

from now on, i submit myself to employing you only in my academic writing, filling out forms that absolutely, specifically insist on 'block letters', when referring to God, and if i forget that i hate you, capital letters, and use you by mistake (This is very likely NEVER to happen because I very rarely make mistakes. I am not so inattentive)!

from,
jeru.

p.s. lowercase letters are cuter.