I don’t think I can explain to you how good this book is without spoiling it, but I’ll try.

First off, let me talk about world-building. If you’re like me and enjoy reading books, you’ll know that it’s hard to find a series with actual, good world-building. Well, wait no more. Shadow and Bone is the perfect world-builder for the Grisha trilogy, managing to explain everything you need to know while still keeping you on the edge of your seat and wanting to know more about its government and the magic system. It’s all perfectly structured, not saying anything too early or too late.

This brings me to another thing about this book. It’s an awesome magic system. It is a structured, organized, and complex, yet simple system. All I’ll say about it is that there are three levels of magic, and each one is cooler than the next. One controls the human body, another controls the elements, and the final one controls materials.