Review: Shadow and Bone - Leigh Bardugo

This book is the first book in the Grisha series. It is quite short compared to some other fantasy books that can surpass the 500 page mark. This book was about 350 pages, and while that sounds like a long book, they pages were quick to read, as they were rather small and the font was quite large. 

As for the plot I liked it. It moved along quite nicely, except for a little bit of a slow patch in the middle, but just as I was starting to wonder what could possibly take up the rest of the book, something happened that took the plot in a completely different direction. As I said, I liked the plot, but it didn’t have me on the edge of my seat most of the time. It just ambled along nicely until the end of the book, when it became more thrilling. 

I wasn’t terribly invested in the fate of the characters. I think maybe just because the book was rather short, so the characters were for the most part described and developed rather summarily. But I did think that the set of characters were interesting enough, and they were each their own separate person. Sometimes characters can blend together for me a bit, if they aren’t described very much, but that didn’t happen here. 

The world building was done quite well, I think. We learned the things we needed to know to understand the plot and the motives of the characters without suffering through info-dumping. It is perhaps not the most extensive world-building I have ever come across, but I found that it was detailed enough for me to understand what I needed to know.

I gave this book 3 stars out of 5 on Goodreads and I will be continuing the series.