Thank you to Edelweiss and Bloomsbury Publishing for letting me read an e-ARC of The Dark Mirror by Samantha Shannon! The long-awaited fifth installment (out of seven) is releasing February 25, 2025! The revised copies of books 1-4 are available everywhere (check your local bookstore or library), so there’s no excuse not to start The Bone Season today! I can promise that after the first couple of chapters, the world will wholly consume you and you won’t want to stop reading.

We open with Paige in a strange place outside of Scion and with the last six months wiped from her memory. We hit the ground running as she escapes the clutches of her unknown captors and works to get her bearings, and, hopefully, her memories back. What follows is non-stop action. Paige Mahoney is not known for being a character who gets much of a break or downtime to breathe and the same is true for much of this novel. Readers, and Paige, are granted a sweet, sweet reprieve from life-threatening action for two blissful chapters as the plot and world slows down just a smidge for a few days (in-book time, of course). Naturally, time doesn’t stop when we want it to, and the adventure and fight to be free of Scion’s clutches continues on.

I held my breath for at least the last quarter of the book and couldn’t put the book down until the very end. The twists and turns were some of Shannon’s best in the series so far and have me wanting to start a series reread to see if I can pick up more foreshadowing than the first time I read them! My only complaint about this book is that I finished it a month before its release and now I’ll have to wait for at least another year for the next book to release! All of my personal sadness aside, this was a phenomenal read and I’m once again convinced there’s nothing Samantha Shannon can’t do.