The Mime Order by Samantha Shannon- Contains Spoilers
Non-Spoiler Thoughts
As I've already said, I wasn't a fan of The Mime Order. This book is over 500 pages and I personally feel that nothing very exciting happened until the last 50 pages. I wasn't a huge fan of The Bone Season, but I wanted to give The Mime Order a chance. I am doubting if I will enjoy The Song Rising and if I will continue with this series at this point. I gave it 2/5 stars on Goodreads.
Cover Chat
Plot
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. 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.
As always, this was taken of Goodreads and the page is linked here.
Opinions
I was really hoping that I was going to like The Mime Order (TMO) more than The Bone Season (TBS), but unfortunately I liked it less. So far this year, my problem with books has been the pacing and this books pacing was by far the worse I have read. Everything just seemed to be dragged out and it took me a while to finish this book because of the pacing. I understand that you can't just have action scenes all the time, but this book had some very good actions scenes and then the character building scenes in-between just dragged the book down.
I touched on this in my TBS review, but I do not like the main characters, Paige and Warden. I find them very irritating and self-centered. All the decisions they make come out of nowhere and there is very little character development. The only character I vaguely like is Nick. Nick is such a sweet character and is so protective of Paige.
Considering the events of TBS, Paige doesn't seem too traumatized. Usually in the second book of a series, the main character is close to having a break down due to events in the first book. While I am glad that Samantha Shannon steered away from this stereotype, I would have liked there to have been more of an impact on Paige and The Seven Seals.
I did enjoy Jaxon as a "kind of villain", as compared to the actual villain (who after reading I still have no idea why they did what they did), was very good and I felt scared of him. Jaxon's character is definitely one of the most developed in the series as he as already gone on a huge journey between two books.
I finished this book a little over two weeks ago as I'm posting this and I still have no idea what actually happened in TMO. It went in a completely different direction to TBS and seemed to have very little to do with what happened in TBS. It would have been more enjoyable if I had understood what had happened and actually answered some of the questions I had from TBS.
My main issue with the plot was Paige's betrayal of Jaxon. To me, it came out of nowhere and felt like an attempt for Paige to have power. While I can see how Jaxon treats the other members of The Seven Seals is bad, the way Paige publicly challenged him was unnecessary.
I am doubting if I will continue with this series, but as I have book three (The Song Rising), I will read that before the year is out. I am not the hugest fan of series more than four books (The Mortal Instruments and Harry Potter being exceptions), so it is interesting that this is going to be a seven book series.
So that concludes my review of The Mime Order by Samantha Shannon. Let me know what you thought of it and you are completely welcome to disagree with me. Just a quick note, I will not be posting regularly on here for the month of May due to exams at the end of the month. I hope you guys can understand, but once they are over, I will be posting lots on here!
Love,
Carenza x
