Review: Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo
Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash
Synopsis:
Orphaned and expendable, Alina Starkov is a soldier who knows she may not survive her first trek across the Shadow Fold—a swath of unnatural darkness crawling with monsters. But when her regiment is attacked, Alina unleashes dormant magic not even she knew she possessed.
Now Alina will enter a lavish world of royalty and intrigue, as she trains with the Grisha—her country’s military elite—and falls under the spell of their notorious leader, the Darkling. He believes Alina can summon a force capable of destroying the Shadow Fold and reuniting their war-ravaged country, but only if she can master her untamed gift. As the threat to the kingdom mounts and Alina unlocks the secrets of her past, she will make a dangerous discovery that could threaten all she loves and the very future of a nation.
I was thoroughly underwhelmed.
“What is infinite? The universe and the greed of men.”
I’m probably going to get a lot of flack for this, since this is such a popular fantasy series, but I can’t help it. I wanted to like this book, I tried to like it. I kept hearing really great things about it from friends; I watched, even enjoyed the Netflix adaptation.
It was just such a generic, formulaic story. The blurb on the cover of the book says “Unlike anything I’ve ever read,” and that is just patently false. I’ve read this story a million times. Shadow and Bone was just a mishmash of YA tropes: the plain girl heroine who gets a makeover and becomes beautiful; said heroine is an orphan and an outcast, but she finds out that she actually has super special powers that can save all of humanity, because she is in fact “the chosen one”; and of course, the forced love triangle between the chosen one and two massive douchebags. The characters were underdeveloped and simplistic, and the relationships between them were woefully lacking.
I never really got a good sense of who Alina Starkov was as a person. The only development we get from her is that she’s an orphan and she’s in love with her best friend, Mal, one of the aforementioned douchebags. But I was left with so many questions about her. What does she even want out of life? Why did she join the army? Why did she become a cartographer? Why is she so loyal to Mal despite the fact that he barely seems to notice her?
The majority of the novel is pretty much Alina bemoaning her looks and her feelings of inadequacy; she spent so much time telling other people that she’s a nobody and she’s not special in any way, that I started to agree with her. Her whole identity was based on being a complete nonentity. She had painfully low self-esteem, but we never knew why she felt that way. Growing up in an orphanage does not automatically guarantee lack of confidence, and neither does being considered plain. It’s the job of the writer to show readers why characters act a certain way, if not in exposition or backstory, then in the actions of the characters, and I didn’t feel like Bardugo did that.
Instead, she relied on reusing tired tropes and characters to supplement the world that she created.
And let’s talk about that world. Ravka is heavily inspired by Russia. But Bardugo’s use of Russian culture did not sit well with me (my grandmother was born in Russia). I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out why exactly I felt so uncomfortable with this. And I think the bottom line is that it felt vaguely appropriative; there wasn’t enough distinction between the two worlds. Bardugo says she loosely based Ravka on Russia, but there’s nothing “loose” about it. She simply took a map of Russia, chopped a bit off here and there, and then gave all the characters vaguely Slavic names.
The name of the supernatural military unit is called the Grisha, which is a diminutive of the name Grigori. It’d be like reading a story set in world like America where a special ops team was called the “Bobs.” Russian words were tossed into the story with reckless abandon; some of them were correctly used (like “tsar” and “tsaritsa”), and some were completely ridiculous. And that’s what I didn’t like. Russia has such a rich culture, which most people know nothing about. It felt like Bardugo chose to use Russian culture to set her fantasy story apart from others, without really taking the time to truly understand it.
I get that Ravka is a fantasy world. I also get that this book is almost ten years old, and that Bardugo has written several responses to the criticism she faced. However, I read those responses, and found them wanting. I’m not trying to nitpick, nor am I saying that because Bardugo is not Russian, she isn’t allowed to take inspiration from the culture. The Bear and the Nightingale series written by Katherine Arden, is one of my favorite books, along with Deathless by Catherynne Valente. These are two excellent examples of authors who have done impeccable research; their deep respect for the culture shines through their lush writing. And that’s what was really missing from this book.