Review: The Mime Order

The Mime Order
Author: Samantha Shannon
Publication Date: January 27th 2015        
Publisher: Bloomsbury
~A copy was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review~

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.

I didn't really get on that well with The Mime Order, I don't know what it was but something just felt disconnected and missing. I wasn't all that raving about The Bone Season either. I liked it well enough, but it wasn't one I'd rave about, it didn't stand out to me, probably because it's confusing and hard to get into, which I hoped wouldn't be the case with The Mime Order, and unfortunately was, for me at least. I wanted to love it, considering the characters had escaped and The Mime Order literally starts right where The Bone Season left off, I thought it would be intense, but even that felt bogged down by overcomplicating things. I get it, things weren't exactly going to go as planned or easy, but it just dragged.

Being back in London, we're back in the world that we only got a hint of at the beginning of The Bone Season, but both worlds are complex and built well, but I still find it confusing, we don't exactly get info-dumped but through conversations between characters, we get to the learn the world around them, but whilst we have some things explained, but the slang and terms used made me disconnected from it, and unless you want to keep checking the glossary, you'll be confused, and while some are familiar now, I still don't actually get it. Like I said, we get to learn the world through the characters but the problem with that is conversations seem forced, and because of that I still can't see any personality in the characters, even Paige's, she's tough and strong, but that's all she is.

My main issue with it is that I was bored all the way through it. Seriously bored. Everything seemed a little over done. Like this one scene that lasted a chapter or two, Paige was going back to the doss house to meet Warden, but people stop her on the way and she chats to them even though she doesn't have that much time and has to be careful because she's wanted. Then she goes into a bar of sorts and gets chatting there, oh, and then has a fight on the way before she even gets back to the doss house. See? By the time she gets there, I've forgotten why she was going there in the first place. You can argue, well, she's going to get into trouble, her face is plastered everywhere and she's a wanted fugitive. Then why can she walk the streets sometimes without any problem or obstacle. Why is she walking the streets at all? All of this just felt like lengthening an already long story, maybe a lot of things, unimportant things in The Mime Order lead up to something bigger later on, as a hint to the way it ended, but all I know right now is that I'm bored, and it's not making me want to continue the series.

The Mime Order, although it's very well thought out and goes in-depth to make the world feel real, I still found it confusing, still can't feel a connections the characters or story, I guess it's just not for me.

Rating: 2/5