Review | The Mime Order

After I read and loved The Bone Season, I knew it’s in my best interest to continue on with the series while everything is still fresh in my mind. It was definitely a good decision. The Bone Season is one of these series you just have to marathon because otherwise you’ll forget everything anf be really confused.

In case you haven’t read The Bone Season, don’t worry. This is the premise of the first book and I’m not going to spoil anything.

The year is 2059 and there are Unnaturals living among normal people. Paige Mahoney is a clairvoyant and in Scion London, a dystopian version of the London we know, her abilites make her existance illegal.

The Warden. At some point while reading The Mime Order I realised he’s the only reason why I was still reading it. I love Warden so much and even though we got to see some parts of him, he still remains mostly a mystery. The chapters he was in were my favorite and I was always waiting for him to show up in others.

Jaxon Hall. I know, it’s weird that I like him but I do. He isn’t supposed to be very likeable and is portrayed as some sort of villain (we have many of those in this series) but I found his characters extremely interesting. He’s sort of a father figure to Paige but in a very untraditional way and I loved the relationship between him and Paige even though it was a bit turbulent (to say the least). I just love well-written morally gray characters!

Absence of romance (mostly). I can’t say there is zero romance in The Mime Order and I won’t lie and say I wasn’t dying to read some make-out scenes but I will say that I appreciated that Shannon didn’t make this series all about romance. We got the very minimum of cute romantic scenes (I don’t think I can even call them cute?) and it worked perfectly with the story (although I would love to get more).

Gay romance. It’s a super minor plotline and probably completely irrelevant to the story but I loved seeing a bit of diversity in this fantasy/dystopian world. It just made my heart happy even though it was present only for a few pages.

The ending. First 3/4 of the book were just a build up to the fabulous, action-packed and gripping ending. I enjoyed every second of reading these last 100-150 pages and was so excited to find out what happens on the next page. This book also has one of the best (and worst) cliffhangers I’ve ever encountered but I think it was very well done. I do feel bad for all the people who read The Mime Order right when it came out and had to wait for two years until the next installment. I don’t have that problem – yet (because I’m sure the next book will have a huge cliffhanger as well).

Boring start. The first 200 pages of this book were so slow and so boring that I even considered DNFing it. Although the build up was important for the later development of the story, it could’ve been done in a lot less than 200 pages.

Paige’s recklessness. At first I liked the heroine who would fight for what she believes in and all that but I soon got dick of it. Paige was just doing stupid decisions and had to go agains everything and everyone even though she was pretty sure it would get her killed. By the ned of the book I was just done with her having to be the hero.

Way too many details. It’s obvious Samantha Shannon’s imagination is wonderful and she came up with this beautifully complex world where pretty much everything is possible if it suits our hero. In the first book I was into it and was eager to find out more about the world. In this one, the world was very much in your face and I got tired of reading about all these types of clairvoyants who I knew nothing about and couldn’t tell them apart no matter how hard I tried. Most of these details were completely unnecessary and did nothing to the story (except for me losing interest).

I can’t say I’m not disappointed in this sequel. The Bone Season was fantastic and The Mime Order definitely suffered the second book syndrome. However, it was still a great read and the ending definitely redeemed the rest of the book – it was so worth it! I guess Shannon’s writing doesn’t always work for me and I wasn’t into her descriptiveness and details while reading this one.

I would still recommend continuing the series if you read The Bone Season because I can feel this series will only grow and become even more mind blowing and complex. I know that I’ll definitely be reading the third book very soon and hopefully enjoy it more that I did this one. And then I’ll wait for the next book alongside the rest of the fandom…

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