A review by tavi_vse
Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab

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

1.75

I want to preface this by saying that I usually love Schwabs books and I Know she's a brilliant author.
I know and appreciate that there a grim books about gruesome things and haunting stories about bad people. It's part of life and it's necessary. It's healthy and important to shape the book industry and society in general.

That's why it pains me to say that I hate this book for so many reasons.
And I don't mean to insult the wonderful author or her brilliant way of writing. I just want to help other people like me by making them aware what they are about to get into before they exicitedly start reading and end up exhausted, disappointed and physically and mentally unwell.

Obviously spoilers ahead.

In my opinion the book isn't exceedingly well written.  It's not bad, but it's also not up to the other books of the author.

The synopsis sounds good enough, right?
But, and again that's my opinion, I don't think the book delivered.

You spent several hundred pages reading about the most annoying brat girl ever. 
Story goes on
and she becomes a vampire, continues to be annoying

The following hundred pages tell the story of her
meeting and ruining a poor girl, grooming and gaslighting her, keeping her in a toxic and domestic/emotionally violent realtionship. Brat girl has become the immortal, even worse version of her dead abusive husband. I get it, we've come full circle. There's a purpose to this, story telling wise, i know. It just... doesn't really do anything with it, i guess that's my problem? We're about half way through and there's  no real story besides watching Sabine be a terrible person throughout the centuries.
But i digress. Next Charlotte, the victim, escapes, obviously traumatised,  and gets stalked by her toxic ex for several decades. At some point another innocent girl is turned into a vampire, and Charlotte then manipulates her into killing her stalker. She does, very unsatisfyingly so, in like the last pages.
and here I am, wondering "what for?" Why building this story of manipulation, grief,hate, abuse and fear without actually doing something worthwhile with it? Like I get it. The message is there, but... I just wished for more? Something more. As said above, not every book has to be pleasant, not every story needs to give you closure, sometimes terrible things need to be shown in a terrible way. But I don't  feel like that's what's going on here. It feels like some unfinished idea with story elements that never got to be actual storylines and never got an ending. So much left unexplored, unfinished. So very little world building, in a story that craves for it.
I don’t know. Also, what maybe irrationally angers me, is that there are no content warnings. Like online there are, but not in the book itself. And I feel that they would've been really, really important here. I expected something wildly different and didn't know to expect 550 pages of emotional torture (lol sorry, but that's what it was to me), if I did, maybe I could've gone about this differently. 
Alas, I want to stress again that I don't think the author did an inherently bad job with this.
I just genuinely think the book gives way too little in exchange for what it takes and could have been so much more.

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