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songofmyself 's review for:
Bone Crier's Moon
by Kathryn Purdie
★½
You're not missing from me. I'm not missing from you.
I cannot believe I slogged through nearly 500 pages of this. Welcome to another chapter in the Cass Doesn't Know How to DNF Books saga. I absolutely hate it here.
I have to believe that this is YA that veers on the younger end, because that would be the only decent explanation of the surface level...everything about this novel. The lore is not well explained, the love is as instantaneous as it can possibly be, and the characters are not drawn in any sort of detail. I have very few nice things to say.
Honestly, I only have one nice thing to say. The first third of this is fun, to some degree. High octane and entertaining, despite the lackluster characters and plotting. But again, we're talking about a book that's almost 500 pages. There's no way Purdie could have kept that house of cards standing.
The main issue with this book is that the characters are only described in relation to the mythology at the center of the world. Absolutely everything you learn about the characters is described in the synopsis. I'm not exaggerating — there is nothing else to gleam. Ailesse is desperate to become a Bone Crier. Sabine is squeamish about what is required to become one. Bastien hates the Bone Criers because one killed his father. And we have to read so many words with just that information to go by. How am I meant to care about any of these people?
So much of this story required my emotional investment even though I was never given the opportunity to form some. After that first third, I felt as if I was standing two blocks away watching two cardboard cutouts seemingly fall in love for absolutely no reason at all. Ailesse still wants to be a Bone Crier; Bastien still hates them. Why I'm supposed to think that their relationship is a great idea, I'll never know. They also, in typical YA fashion, fall in love after blinking at one another a few times, basically. On top of that, we get more caricatures in the form of Bastien's sidekicks, Jules and Marcel. Jules only exists to be mad about Ailesse and Bastien to extreme degrees, only just short of being a raving, shrieking stalker. Marcel just really, really likes to read. Riveting stuff.
Sabine is the character who experiences the most growth over the course of the book, but it all feels inauthentic. She starts the story pained to kill even a salamander and somehow becomes a huge force in the blink of an eye. Most annoyingly, she is quite literally guided to that point by the biggest perpetual plot convenience I've read about in quite some time.
The "big bad" of sorts is the biggest joke of all. Without getting into details, I really, really don't appreciate the fact that the vast majority of the female characters in the novel only exist to make foolish decisions because they're just so in love with some dude. The fact that Sabine is the only outlier is her one redeeming quality.
The one and a half stars here is for the little enjoyment I experienced at the beginning and the small promise that the lore presented at the start. I appreciate the French-inspired world and was pulled into the atmosphere on a couple occasions.
But, otherwise, nothing to write home about here.
You're not missing from me. I'm not missing from you.
I cannot believe I slogged through nearly 500 pages of this. Welcome to another chapter in the Cass Doesn't Know How to DNF Books saga. I absolutely hate it here.
I have to believe that this is YA that veers on the younger end, because that would be the only decent explanation of the surface level...everything about this novel. The lore is not well explained, the love is as instantaneous as it can possibly be, and the characters are not drawn in any sort of detail. I have very few nice things to say.
Honestly, I only have one nice thing to say. The first third of this is fun, to some degree. High octane and entertaining, despite the lackluster characters and plotting. But again, we're talking about a book that's almost 500 pages. There's no way Purdie could have kept that house of cards standing.
The main issue with this book is that the characters are only described in relation to the mythology at the center of the world. Absolutely everything you learn about the characters is described in the synopsis. I'm not exaggerating — there is nothing else to gleam. Ailesse is desperate to become a Bone Crier. Sabine is squeamish about what is required to become one. Bastien hates the Bone Criers because one killed his father. And we have to read so many words with just that information to go by. How am I meant to care about any of these people?
So much of this story required my emotional investment even though I was never given the opportunity to form some. After that first third, I felt as if I was standing two blocks away watching two cardboard cutouts seemingly fall in love for absolutely no reason at all. Ailesse still wants to be a Bone Crier; Bastien still hates them. Why I'm supposed to think that their relationship is a great idea, I'll never know. They also, in typical YA fashion, fall in love after blinking at one another a few times, basically. On top of that, we get more caricatures in the form of Bastien's sidekicks, Jules and Marcel. Jules only exists to be mad about Ailesse and Bastien to extreme degrees, only just short of being a raving, shrieking stalker. Marcel just really, really likes to read. Riveting stuff.
Sabine is the character who experiences the most growth over the course of the book, but it all feels inauthentic. She starts the story pained to kill even a salamander and somehow becomes a huge force in the blink of an eye. Most annoyingly, she is quite literally guided to that point by the biggest perpetual plot convenience I've read about in quite some time.
The "big bad" of sorts is the biggest joke of all. Without getting into details, I really, really don't appreciate the fact that the vast majority of the female characters in the novel only exist to make foolish decisions because they're just so in love with some dude. The fact that Sabine is the only outlier is her one redeeming quality.
The one and a half stars here is for the little enjoyment I experienced at the beginning and the small promise that the lore presented at the start. I appreciate the French-inspired world and was pulled into the atmosphere on a couple occasions.
But, otherwise, nothing to write home about here.