Reviews with content warning for Child death - A House with Good Bones

Reviews tagging 'Child death'

A House with Good Bones by T. Kingfisher

6 reviews

orizenda's review against another edition

dark funny mysterious fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

so ended up actually rly liking it even tho i didn’t like the narrator that much sometimes. maybe i just don’t like that it felt like she was talking to me does she use second person? I don’t remember but it feels like it does to me anyway. also it was actually creepy to me. like idk bugs r one thing but the children 😳 i was dying. also I kind of like… thought it felt weird that there’s like talk abt diversity in the book like sam feels very black lives matter to me but like are any of the characters not white? like maria but does she even really appear in the story? idk it just felt performative ig in that aspect. but i liked it overall

Content Warnings

dreamy_demon's review against another edition

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mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

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tigger89's review against another edition

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mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

Anything by T. Kingfisher is an auto-request for me, at this point. I love that woman's imagination. A creepy southern gothic, while less fantastic than her previous stories I'd read, is still right up my alley. And I loved the narrator! She was a joy to ride around with, whether she was snarking about the wifi or nerding out about bugs. As someone who's around the same age as Sam, I could relate heavily to her anxieties regarding her aging mother. The finale was also incredible, keeping tension high from the moment Sam stepped back into the house until the matter was resolved.

Unfortunately, overall I didn't like this book as much as Kingfisher's other two. Perhaps it was the genre shift, the addition of teased romantic tension between our intrepid protagonist and the sexy gardener, or the fact that a large part of the story's build-up could have been skipped if the protagonist and her mother had just had That Conversation at any point before the story was two-thirds of the way over. But that doesn't mean it's bad! The bar was just set very high, is all.

Now, the most important question: do the vultures and/or ladybugs die?

There is a committee of vultures, one named and many unnamed. All survive to the end of the story. There are also many, many ladybugs. Unfortunately, some of the ladybugs get squashed in the course of the story, but the majority of them survive.

Content Warnings