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4.24 AVERAGE
4.24 AVERAGE
adventurous
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
slow-paced
This is a long book, but an enjoyable journey. At times it felt repetitive, especially as each woman was in the beginning stages of turning. The ending felt anticlimactic with our reluctant hero. I just didn't feel like her back story gave me solid closure with how she ended Sabine and Charlotte. It also kind of bugged me that the men in this book were all shown in this mentor light, but the women weren't positioned in the same way. Matteo had restraint, Jack was a gentleman, Ezra was level headed. But our women were all victims to their emotions.
dark
emotional
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
emotional
mysterious
medium-paced
dark
mysterious
slow-paced
Absolutely loved this book. The characters, the timelines, the shocker of an ending! But it did seem to drag at some points and felt unnecessarily long.
dark
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This was everything I love about books and reading. I inhaled this and did not want it to end. Beautiful prose, complex characters that drive the story rather than lots of plot that gets you from point A to point B. Very much like Addie LaRue which I am also obsessed with. I’m afraid I’m going to be chasing the high of this for awhile
adventurous
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
The thing about Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, I think, is that whether you love it or not, it is an indisputable fact that it will take up space.
As it happens, I didn’t love it. Don’t get me wrong; the writing is masterful. The nonlinear timeline is compelling and complex, and I can only imagine how brain bending it was to keep it all straight while actually writing the thing.
As I’m writing this review, I’m struggling with how to do so without spoilers, because it’s difficult to discuss this book without talking about critical aspects of it that the reader discovers along the way. I’ll start by saying that I don’t generally read vampire fiction. Oddly enough, this is the third I’ve read in the past year. And, frankly, if we were going by how much I enjoyed the story itself I would say this one was my least favorite. But if we’re talking about how well the book manages to get in your head or fuel discussion, this one has to win hands down.
I didn’t like any of the characters, honestly, but I suspect that is by design. The one you root for the most is the one who is least awful. And here’s the thing: I read the book because a friend of mine (you know who you are) said that the ending made her want to throw the book across the room, and she needed someone to yell at about it. Which made me curious enough to check it out (understandably so, I think). Five hundred plus pages later, we spent an hour arguing good-naturedly about what really happened in the end.
And that is what actually makes this book worth reading. Because I’ll be honest, while I was reading it, I kept on bitching about the fact that there was no point. It was just a book about the life of three sapphic vampires. And it’s not a romance; don’t make that mistake. It’s a five-hundred-page soap opera. It’s a very well written one, and it will hold your interest, but there is no end goal here for any of these characters. There’s no grand adventure, no saving the world, no mystery to solve. It’s just three women at various points in history, navigating the vagaries of vampirehood. Vampiredom? Whatever; you get the gist.
You might even get to the end and think to yourself “what the actual… I just spent three days on that?!?!” But then someone asks you why Charlotte did what she did in the end, and you spend an hour discussing the existential reality of fictional vampires, and you realize, well, damn. That was the point.