The Bone Season, by Samantha Shannon, 466 pages

Set in 2059, Paige Mahoney works in the seedy underbelly of a crime syndicate in London.  It's about the only job she can hold and still make decent money, since she's one of many in the world who are considered clairvoyant.  Unfortunately, the English government, Scion, considers clairvoyants dangerous "unnaturals", and likes to round them up to be executed swiftly.  Paige manages to avoid detection, until one night when she decides to take the subway home and officers of the Night Vigilance Division get on her train to do a check for clairvoyants.  As a dreamwalker, she uses her power to shove her spirit into the minds of the officers, killing one and turning the other into a vegetable, and manages to make it home to her father's apartment.  Knowing that she's living on borrowed time, she decides to escape into the night, only to get caught and shipped off to what used to be Oxford, but is now the penal colony of Sheol I.  Ruled by the Rephaim, clairvoyants are brought there every ten years to be harvested, so to speak, by the Rephaim and to be trained in their powers, ultimately to be used to fight the mysterious Emim.  Except training often pits clairvoyants against each other, with the Rephaim using fear and pain to make the clairvoyants weak and willing to do anything to be accepted, even if it means keeping tabs on other clairvoyants and turning them in if they do something against the rules.  Paige ends up under the tutelage of Warden, and immediately chafes against the expectations of life in Sheol I.  But she soon learns that there is more to fear in Sheol I than potentially becoming a traitor to her fellow clairvoyants and living out the rest of her short life fighting the Emim.

I had initially heard about this book after seeing something online about how Samantha Shannon was the next J.K. Rowling, but that's kind of an unfair comparison, in my opinion, because the story Shannon's telling is COMPLETELY different from Harry Potter.  While the clairvoyance element does put the story into the realm of fantasy with Harry Potter, the dystopic setting is equally as important to the story, and, in some ways, is the main source of problems for Paige, making it wholly different from Harry Potter.  That being said, Shannon writes a pretty intriguing world, and leaves enough plot threads hanging to make me want more.  I did have some problems keeping certain things straight, since Paige uses a lot of slang.  There is a glossary in the back, but I didn't discover it until I was almost to the end of the story.  There is also a fair amount of info dumping from Paige to explain some of what's going on, as well as a few characters who happen to know information when it's not totally clear as to how they learned it, or why they would be privy to that information, but I was having so much fun I was willing to chalk it up to an inexperienced author and keep going.  Definitely check it out if you're still enjoying the dystopia trend and are into stories with lots of plot and action.