3.5 stars*** 
 It's hard to put my feelings about The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon into words because I'm still not entirely sure about what exactly it was that I read. Don't get me wrong... the story and the writing are quite good in regards to a high fantasy dystopian novel. It's just that there was so much backstory to learn about this world that for the most part I was kind of lost. I mean... it was necessary to have a glossary in the back of the book to help the readers make sense of the terminology! That's a red flag right there that this is going to be a DENSE read. 
 I think the overall "dense-ness" of The Bone Season is what stopped me from really enjoying it as much as I should have. There were so many slang terms and different types/casts of clairvoyance that I kept getting lost. I can't even count how many times I had to go back and re-read a page because I couldn't keep the innumerable facts straight. There was just too much story. I know... that's a super strange complaint to have. The sense that I had to learn and study all this new world building just made the reading of The Bone Season exhausting at the end of the day. This is really unfortunate because The Bone Season is actually really well written and quite good as far as a high fantasy dystopian story goes. 
 Basically the gist of The Bone Season is that in the near future clairvoyance is everywhere and normal people hate those with special abilities. This leads to a police state called Scion and underground crime syndicates made up of clairvoyants. If you are a clairvoyant, you do not want to get caught because Scion will execute you. We follow Paige, a young woman and powerful clairvoyant dream walker, after she is captured and taking into the custody of the Rephaim. The Rephaim are "fae" like creatures (as far as I can tell) and they are essentially slave masters who kidnap clairvoyant humans and make them servants, entertainers, or soldiers. The Rephaim are seriously twisted and their colony is essentially a concentration camp. Paige must escape and she finds help in the other humans with a desire to fight back as well as with some of the more sympathetic Rephaim, including her master Arcturus. 
 OK... so there's an obligatory romance between Paige and Arcturus. I have some definite issues with this. First of all, they aren't even the same species. So, right off the bat it's pretty weird for them to be romantically linked. JUST SAYING... Second, as her master he requires her to address him as "Warden" which she continues to do throughout the story. It troubled me that she continued to call him Warden even after they kissed. Why would she still refer to him as her "master" after she developed romantic feelings towards him? The whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth. 
 Overall, The Bone Season was pretty good. However, The Bone Season is also incredibly dense. It made it hard to get through. In fact, it was so hard to get through that I'm having my doubts about continuing on with the series. I liked the story but I didn't like it so much to continue reading a series that's slated to be SEVEN books long. That's frankly an intense amount of reading that I'm not entirely sure I'm up for. This series has potential to be really awesome but not awesome enough for SEVEN books. I think this should be more of a four book series. I guess what I really have been trying to say all along is that ultimately I liked The Bone Season but, in the end, I just didn't love it.