Review: Shadow and Bone: Season 2

Remember that episode of Friends when Rachel and Chandler were fighting over the cheesecake and it ended up all over the hall, but tasted so good that they just ate it off the floor? That’s the best analogy I have for season two of Shadow and Bone. It’s delicious, but it has, in fact, exploded all over the floor. Or, if you like, it has exploded all over the floor, but it still tastes delicious.

Perhaps this was inevitable. On the one hand, there’s the looming spectre of cancellation-happy Netflix hanging over the show, which no doubt made everyone want to squeeze in as much material as they could just in case the axe falls. Then there’s showrunner Eric Heisserer’s open preference for the Six of Crows characters, inserting them into the narrative at every available opportunity and expediting Alina’s story to get to theirs.

Even the structure of the Grisha-verse book series itself poses a problem, starting with the Shadow and Bone trilogy* which was a standard YA trope-ridden fantasy of “plucky girl plucked from obscurity negotiates love triangle while saving world from sexy dark lord who has the hots for her.”

* Simultaneously kickstarting the current surge of Slavic fantasy novels and the YA trend of [noun] and [noun] titles, including A Court of Frost and Starlight, The Girl of Fire and Storm, A Curse So Dark and Lonely, A Book of Spirits and Thieves, A Sorrow Fierce and Falling, and Girls of Storm and Shadow, which is part of the Girls of Paper and Fire trilogy – yes, those are all for real.

The trilogy was followed by the Six of Crows/Crooked Kingdom duology, which deliberately set out to buck those clichés, a gas-lamp fantasy centred around a heist and the complex dynamics and backstories of its six core characters. Lastly, there’s the King of Scars/Rule of Wolves duology, which wrapped up plot-points, character arcs and political situations from the previous two sets of books. There’s also a couple of short story collections, such as The Language of Thorns and Lives of the Saints, which provide more details on the world’s invented mythology.

The second season of the Netflix show builds its story from nearly all these books: Siege and Storm, Ruin and Rising, Crooked Kingdom, King of Scars and Lives of the Saints, which is how we get to the exploded cheesecake.

Review: Shadow and Bone: Season 1

The Netflix adaptation of Leigh Bardugo’s Shadow and Bone was a viewing event. I’d read all the available books (excepting Rule of Wolves) and put the release date on my calendar, opting to travel to my friend’s house and watch the whole thing across a single weekend (four episodes per night) on his big screen television. I took this seriously!

I’d consider myself a fan of the book series (currently made up of one trilogy and two duologies, plus a smattering of short stories) for their dark fairy tale ambience and moral complexity, especially in Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom. Leigh Bardugo is a writer who knows her audience, what with her mastery of witty banter, traumatic backstories and shipping tropes, and yet she avoids certain pitfalls of other popular YA writers. There is little in the way of wish fulfilment here, and it’s replaced with a genuine sense of weight when it comes to her subject matter.

The whole thing was ripe for a streaming adaptation, and I sincerely hope that we’ll get the chance to see the entire saga play out, despite the “changing of the guard” when it comes to the protagonists: from Alina to the six Crows to Zoya and Prince Nikolai (not even introduced in the series yet) across the three sets of stories.

We’re off to a good start, with a first season that’s far from perfect, but which has a decent budget, an engaging premise, and spot-on casting. Seriously, everyone looks and behaves exactly like their book counterparts – even when some creative liberties have been taken. Alina and Mal were white in the books, and are here played by bi-racial actors, yet they embody their characters so perfectly I won’t be able to picture anyone but Jessie Mei Li and Archie Renaux in the roles from now on.

This rather negative (but fair) review points out that you can tell the show is YA by the way the material focuses on relationships over world-building, with romantic complications and love triangles taking precedence over what could have potentially been a genuinely fascinating political setup. I’ll delve more into that later, but watching the show and being aware of its target audience had the unexpected side-effect of making me feel old for the first time in my life.

Which is ridiculous since I’m still younger than Ben Barnes – and yet when I last skyped my sister and mentioned watching it, she (totally unprompted) said: “it made me realize I’m not a teenager anymore.” So it obviously had the same effect on other people too!

Even the show itself seems oddly self-conscious about the fact only one significant cast member is over the age of forty-five, to the point where a joke is made in which Jesper has to impersonate someone significantly older than him, and is indignant that anyone could think he would pass for that age – only for a snide official to tell him: “I thought you were older.”

The joke falls completely flat, since... my God, they’re CLEARLY all children! And to add another layer of irony on top of that, these actors are STILL at least a DECADE older than the characters they play in the books! Matthias is meant to be the only legal adult at eighteen!

So, if you plan on recommending this to co-workers or friends, do as I did and add the disclaimer that it’s the most YA thing they’ll ever see and may induce a premature mid-life-crisis.

Review: The Grisha Trilogy

 

Before reading a word of Leigh Bardugo’s The Grisha trilogy (comprised of Shadow and Bone, Siege and Storm and Ruin and Rising), I was left bemused by the endorsement from Stylist Magazine that was blazoned across the cover of the second instalment:

A New York Times bestseller, it’s like The Hunger Games meets Harry Potter meets Twilight meets Lord of the Rings meets Game of Thrones; basically epic magical fantasy but completely for grown-ups.

Wow, that’s... quite a list of comparisons. Technically all those books fall within the very broad spectrum of the fantasy genre, but to use them all at once is rather like comparing a meal of lamb chops to beef, bacon and venison. I mean, they’re all meat, right?

But just for the sake of it, let’s sift through Stylist’s chosen comparisons (and add a few more).