Review: The Mime Order (The Bone Season #2) by Samantha Shannon

Firstly, thanks to Bloomsbury Australia for this review copy <3



Release Date: January 27th 2015

Publisher: Bloomsbury Australia
Source: Review copy via publisher
Genre: Sci-fi/paranormal
My rating: 

This review contains spoilers for The Bone Season but not The Mime Order.

Synopsis:

"Paige Mahoney has escaped the brutal prison camp of Sheol I, but her problems have only just begun: many of the survivors are missing and she is the most wanted person in London...

As Scion turns its all-seeing eye on the dreamwalker, the mime-lords and mime-queens of the city's gangs are invited to a rare meeting of the Unnatural Assembly. Jaxon Hall and his Seven Seals prepare to take centre stage, but there are bitter fault lines running through the clairvoyant community and dark secrets around every corner. Then the Rephaim begin crawling out from the shadows. But where is Warden? Paige must keep moving, from Seven Dials to Grub Street to the secret catacombs of Camden, until the fate of the underworld can be decided."

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“Hope is the lifeblood of revolution. Without it, we are nothing but ash, waiting for the wind to take us.”

When I turned the last page of The Bone Season last year I knew that I would trust whatever journey Samantha Shannon took us over the course of the next 6 books. Some 500 pages later as I finished The Mime Order, I knew that trust had not been misplaced.

“And words, my walker – well, words are everything. Words give wings to those that have been stamped upon, broken beyond all hope of repair.”

Get ready to deep dive back into the world of Scion and strap yourselves in for a wild ride because Shannon’s gripping sequel holds you from the first page, much like how Paige holds the dreamscapes of those she’s jumped into. You surrender yourself and your surroundings to The Mime Order. You are in Scion.

Paige is back to being mollisher of I4. Well sort of. She’s trying to incite change in the voyant world and warn the Unnatural Assembly of the impending danger of the Rephaim. She’s a changed girl. No longer the mollisher that bows to the White Binder’s every whim, she now questions his actions and those around her. I loved her growth in TMO from TBS. I still remember our girl telling Warden she’d had enough in Sheol 1 when he pushed her, but now? Now she doesn’t give up. Paige manages to get herself in so many dangerous and sticky (slimy, literally) situations but she always thinks ahead. She holds so much potential and the power she harnesses is phenomenal. Because she has sparked a rebellion and she’s the only one strong enough to turn that into a revolution.

“I want you to jump into the aether as if you belonged there. I want you to fly between dreamscapes.”

I loved being able to see the Seven Seals in-depth. Where we got snippets of events and memories from The Bone Season, we see the real thing in The Mime Order. There’s ever kind and caring Nick who’s one of the most genuine and sweet guys I’ve ever read; adorable Zeke who I think is still finding his place; the bitter Nadine who is so loyal to Jaxon and has to step down as temporary mollisher when Paige returns; sweet Eliza who loves the Seven Seals more than anything. And then there is Jaxon Hall. You know how people used to go “talk to the hand” (or still do I don’t know) because they didn’t really care what you had to say and thought themselves better than you? This is Jaxon Hall. And he has every right. He is arrogant, intelligent, cunning, flamboyant, eccentric, a pure genius, fabulous and a dickhead. Ohmygoodness the way he speaks is so lavish and eloquent, Shannon has really done a number on his dialogue to make him stand out. I adored the layers of his character. Does he really care about his Seven Seals? Is it their actual person he cares for? Or what their gifts offer him? Or that they worship him? It was amazing reading and slowly peeling back the layers that were Jaxon Hall only to find more underneath. Mark my words, we haven’t seen them all yet. This man is a piece of work I tell you. I think the White Binder is one of the most intricately developed and memorable characters I’ve read in my entire life.

“I know we have our differences, but we are the Seven Seals. Brought together across oceans and fault lines by the mysterious wiles of the aether. It wasn’t chance. It was fate. And we shall bring about a day of reckoning in London.”

You know what else is memorable? The world building of this Scion London Shannon has created. There was rustic Sheol I in The Bone Season and now we can truly see Paige’s Scion through her eyes as she traverses through the sections. The descriptions of the city are so detailed and enigmatic, enticing yet repulsing. Filled with slums, mazes of streets and buildings above and below ground, it’s almost like the whole of Scion is encased in a sheen of poverty regardless of the riches of the mime-lords and mime-queens. I got the sense that the luxurious furnishings were slightly shabby with time, passed down through the decades from a better era. Buildings decayed by the rain and perpetually dank. Yet this is balanced with the lush, mouth-watering foods the rich do have money to spend on. Wao I’d be willing to live one day in Scion just to taste the amazing foods Shannon described. Fantastic writing is fantastic.

“Shiny buttered peas, steaming in paper ramekins; masses of mashed potato, some fluffy white, some tined with pea-green or rose; sausages spitting in a cast-iron pan.”

Underneath all this worn grandeur are lies upon lies. Conspiracies within conspiracies. Scion. Rephaim. The Unnatural Assembly. There are secrets everywhere. As the story continues, the plot thickens and I had no idea what to make of everything that was happening and who to start pointing fingers at. It’s all so delectably crafted so that you just keep gobbling up the words and then pages trying to see what happens next – the settling in Scion of Part One, the questions beginning to form in Part Two, and then that increasing tension and jaw dropping Part Three which was my personal favourite. THEN, Shannon decides to throw me completely off my feet with the last page. BOOM. And where is Warden you ask? Well you’ll have to read and find out (; I will say one thing – I think I love him.

“My sordid, sacred SciLo, my prison and my home.”

And here we are. Secrets, lies, betrayals and a helluva lot of tension later… there are more secrets, lies and betrayal. Scion, you just keep on giving.

“You’ll have to wait and see how it ends.”