Shadow and Bone follows young mapmaker Alina as she discovers her ability to summon sunlight capable of blasting away a literal, tangible darkness that divides the kingdom. With her debut novel, Bardugo wanted to step away from the typical medieval England setting so commonly seen in fantasy novels and chose Imperial Russia as inspiration for her world, Ravka. But while the setting itself bypassed the usual conventions, she leaned on a narrow worldview to populate the saga.
“I was really echoing a lot of the fantasies I’d grown up with, which were very white, very straight sort of traditional Chosen One stories,” Bardugo tells Polygon.