Review by kyrenora - The BoneKeeper's Daughter

kyrenora 's review for:

The BoneKeeper's Daughter by Elise Fry

5.0

adventurous challenging dark emotional reflective tense 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: Complicated

Wren was not raised like the other children of her village. That’s because she is the youngest Keeper the bones have ever chosen. Bones are everywhere where she comes from, making up the very walls they live within. Many still have their souls inside them, and those that do whisper to a single chosen one every generation. They chose Wren as soon as she was born.

The Bones also choose who will become an Offering to the gods at the BoneKeeper’s hand. At least, that’s what is supposed to happen. Some on the Council saw Wren’s youth and gender as weakness. They saw that as opportunity. They have worked hard to bend her – and the very laws of nature – to their will.

This first installment of the trilogy is a fully immersive, gritty and riveting dystopian fantasy with a lot of pain and anger inside of it. At the same time, it’s weaving a number of lovely stories about community and tradition and the ways we interact with death and grief. The magic system is downright macabre, but it draws you in in a way you can’t turn away from.

The content warnings deserve careful review, but the darkness never feels forced for the sake of brutality and shock value. Instead, it serves as a contrast to highlight the enduring slivers of joy, wonder, love that can still slip through the cracks of even the harshest of worlds. It tells powerful stories of grief, including aspects of it far less ugly than those that typically spring to mind with the topic.

Using this lens of grief, we see the necessity of community in daily life. It teaches us hard lessons about protecting our communities. It beautifully demonstrates the complexity and messiness of humans. Readers see how a good person can become a person who believes themselves to be the only good one when everyone else disagrees. We see how this affects the community as a whole when an individual is not correctly supported early enough. The damage that can be done by seemingly small actions of intentional misinformation or looking the other way is achingly clear here.

This book has a listed print length of 716 pages for the paperback version. Typically when I read books of that length, the pacing is slower than I prefer. Or, when there are multiple POVs, there’s usually one or two I’m less fond of. At no point during The BoneKeeper’s Daughter did I feel that way. I was on the edge of my seat the whole way through, eager to know what came next. I spent nights reading until 3 or 4 in the morning when I needed to get my daughter up for school in the morning.

Yes, there were moments where I had to put the book down and process for a while, but I never wanted a moment to rush. I’m already hungry for the next installment of this trilogy, which will be called The BloodLetter’s Sister. I have not found any announcement yet of a release date, but I’m sure I’ll be giving you an update. I’ll be trying to get my hands on an ARC of that one too.

(Review notes originally published to writing.hallidaynelson.com)

Content Warnings