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cauthons 's review for:
The Bone Orchard
by Sara A. Mueller
***THE VERSION OF THIS THAT I READ WAS AN ARC***
/Beastie Boys yell/ YEAAAAAH!!
ETA 06/23: Full review post-publication.
How deliciously fucking weird this book is.
I am a proponent of explaining nothing and simply getting on with things, and it's like Mueller heard me and did precisely that. The world Charm and her boneghosts live in is an oddly close, precarious one, which only emphasizes how thoroughly it starts to shake itself apart by the latter half of the book.
The reader's knowledge, instead of being artificially expanded by the infodumps all too common to any genre, is just as limited, convoluted, and comprised of confusing half-truths and false memories as the boneghosts' are, which satisfyingly turns the driving force of the plot from "who did this?" to "what was even done?".
To that end, I'm put slightly in mind of Caitlin Starling's Yellow Jessamine, except Mueller's boneghosts manage to come out much better, on the whole, than Starling's Delphinium.
Finally, the conflicts of this book are comprised of a light dash of imperial politics and a refreshingly heavy dose of the resolutely interpersonal dramas of those caught up in the former, especially since Charm and her boneghosts, who are all living in the uneasy, half-acceptable space afforded to sex workers (even in fantasy), have no real way of shifting the eventual consequences of the empire-level maneuvering happening around them.
/Beastie Boys yell/ YEAAAAAH!!
ETA 06/23: Full review post-publication.
How deliciously fucking weird this book is.
I am a proponent of explaining nothing and simply getting on with things, and it's like Mueller heard me and did precisely that. The world Charm and her boneghosts live in is an oddly close, precarious one, which only emphasizes how thoroughly it starts to shake itself apart by the latter half of the book.
The reader's knowledge, instead of being artificially expanded by the infodumps all too common to any genre, is just as limited, convoluted, and comprised of confusing half-truths and false memories as the boneghosts' are, which satisfyingly turns the driving force of the plot from "who did this?" to "what was even done?".
To that end, I'm put slightly in mind of Caitlin Starling's Yellow Jessamine, except Mueller's boneghosts manage to come out much better, on the whole, than Starling's Delphinium.
Finally, the conflicts of this book are comprised of a light dash of imperial politics and a refreshingly heavy dose of the resolutely interpersonal dramas of those caught up in the former, especially since Charm and her boneghosts, who are all living in the uneasy, half-acceptable space afforded to sex workers (even in fantasy), have no real way of shifting the eventual consequences of the empire-level maneuvering happening around them.