A review by bookbanshee
The Bone People by Keri Hulme

challenging dark emotional funny hopeful sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

This book is extraordinary and heart shattering and beautiful, and also should be on more booklists of novels featuring queer First Nations characters. Talking about Kerewin to friends I feel like that clip of Willem Dafoe talking about his character in The Boondock Saints: “she’s an asexual hermit but she has a special connection with wordplay and playing guitar— there are many interesting things about her !!” Simon is a scrap of sunshine, painfully resilient as the receptacle for multiple adults’ accumulations of trauma, and ultimately is the healing catalyst needed if only those hard hearts will dare let it happen. Joe’s reckoning with the pain of his pain, the harm he has caused, is critically essential sitting-with for every would-be abolitionist. The deeptime of Māori storying ripples and tremors its way into the narrative in layered rupture, until finally, from the rubble, the rough stitches of repair might be made possible…

I loved every line of this book, the slipperiness of interiority and bird’s eye view, the visceral swings from exquisite joy to bonecrushing despair, the harsh and storied landscapes, the histories homed in a body. This one will stay with me a long time.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Alcoholism, Body horror, Body shaming, Child abuse, Drug use, Physical abuse, Suicidal thoughts, Violence, Grief, Suicide attempt, Alcohol, Injury/Injury detail

Moderate: Cancer, Child death, Death, Self harm, Terminal illness, Medical content, Medical trauma, Abandonment

Familial estrangement, ace-phobia/anti-ace sentiment, self loathing