The Bone Season

You know things are not going well when a book makes you feel like you had a stroke. This one... did that to me and I wasn't happy.
Not sure what I really expected, I mean it's a typical teenage girl YA, which is something I dislike from the get go, but I tried. Actually, I tried until about 80% of the book and I still dislike it, so I think it's safe to just give up and say how I feel.

In Scion London, in the future people with supernatural abilities are not treated well. If the government catches you, you are lost, nobody comes back from that. Paige Mahoney is one of these supernatural people, which is bad, but she has a perk; she got picked up by a criminal gang of outsiders like herself. Sure, it is crime, their boss is cruel, but among her kind, she has is great.
Up until one day she gets snatched from her home and it turns out the disappeared are taken to a secret colony, lead by not quite human creatures.

This is one of the most graceless things I've ever read. Miss Shannon has absolutely no idea when a world is adequately built, she just keeps tacking on more glitter, more weird crap, more bits and pieces. Sure, an intricate world is good, A Song of Ice and Fire is awesome with its million families and cultures and everything. This, though... is just messy and impossible to follow.
We have a million different kinds of abilities, a lot of them coming even with slang name, but we do not get explained what they do. Paige has... of course a special one, even among all the specials. So it makes even less sense.
All in all, we get pushed in without anything. The book contains an outrageous amount of in-world slang. You have a little dictionary in the back and some supposed helping material with the different abilities drawn up on handy diagram (that still doesn't explain what individual one DOES), but again, it feels like the writing itself lacks any subtle ways of easing us in. Which, in my mind, is a bad sign for the book's quality. I don't want to read up on a million things just to be able to get some ridiculous YA book.

Can we also talk about the way I am annoyed by yet another teen girl fantasy where the characters are dumb as hell? Paige is supposedly some criminal underground cool girl, yet she seems to absolutely NO perspective and she doesn't understand why starving, sickly, unequipped people enslaved under superhuman probably aliens in a place that is basically one massive prison just... don't feel like rebelling in pathetic, school girl ways.
Buuuuut of course she is just so special and unique and AMAZING that she gets picked as the heir of her crime lord, then she is chosen by one of the alien guys, who is special even among his kind to be his apprentice, but of course they form a magical soul bond and OMG, they are so going to be in love, because he's the hottest guy around and she is the protagonist.
I swear this couldn't even be more typical. She is protesting so far, though, which means it's even more romantic and totally not just some token resistance.

Another thing. According to Goodreads, this thing is going to be 7 books long. 7. I have absolutely NO idea what they can stretch out to fill 7 full size novels with this vapid little girl daydream. Let me guess, 10 more people will realise they just NEED Paige for whatever reason, because nobody can measure up to her greatness.

I didn't need this book at all. It wasn't good, it wasn't fun and it definitely didn't make me want to read any more of this series. The review probably turned a bit bitchy, but I completely lost my patience with this specific book and its ilk at this point.

Oh, by the way, the fact that the author is young is treated like some great thing. I find that counterproductive. Being young and writing a book is not some glory, literature is not a race. Maybe we should just allow every author to mature, to pick up enough experience in life, to work on their technique. God knows this book would have profited from someone with a more subtle technique that doesn't try to hit you in the head with a brick.

Have a nice day and let me leave on vacation during this season instead!