A review by nostoat
Your Blood, My Bones by Kelly Andrew

5.0

They'd dreamed together. They'd fought together. And eventually - reluctantly - they'd grown together.

"You're mine. You and Peter. You always have been." / "People don't belong to people." / "Don't they? I take care of what's mine."

He could only remember James. The way he laughed, lit from beneath by a firefly glow. He could only remember Wyatt, and the way the skies thundered when he kissed her that first impossible time. 

 This book hit me in the same place that remembering reading Narnia, watching Little Woman (2019), and watching my nieces and nephews grow up while contemplating the flow of my own life between my fingers does. Which is to say, it hit me in the gut with all the force of a freight train with emotions about childhood, growing up, leaving it all behind, being haunted by the ghosts of the past good and bad and complicated. It doesn't matter how grey the skies were, the golden moments of joy still ache like taking a bite of fresh from the freezer ice cream. I feel it in my teeth, in my bones, in my soul. This book is one long "you can't go back, god, you can't go back, you just can't ever go back."

It's also a story about three people so deeply deeply entangled, it's as though the green sap of Willow Heath runs through all their veins. It's always the three of them, you see. There is hate, there is anger, there is violence and blood and crying and kissing. And at the end of it all there they are. What relationship between three people who grew up under the heavy thumb of a strange, pressing ritual guild could possibly come out normal in the wash? Their hands are bloody for each other; their arms locked in an embrace nothing could possibly break. Is it romance? Sure I guess. I don't know. I'm aromantic. To me, this is simply the deepest well of devotion that could possibly exist; bigger than romance. Deeper than romance. 

There is so much pain in this book, but there is also power. Andrew, in my opinion, balances the power dynamics so deftly on a knife's edge. It's thrilling. It's delicious. I felt like I was reading a feast spread just for me. 
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