The first full week of June is complete and we’ve reached June 9. Excluding audiobooks, beta reads, and my daughter’s storytime, I actually only read one book this week. That’s a first since I started my weekly series! My only sister’s wedding to her partner of 12 years took priority over my usual reading time, and the book was a much longer title than I usually cover. However, it was a great story that really maximized my reading time enjoyment! Here’s the recap.

1. The BoneKeeper’s Daughter – Elise Fry

CW: Human Sacrifice, Blood, Child Abuse, SA, Sexism, Cannibalism, Self-Injury, Loss of Parent, Confinement, Child Death, War, Classism, Famine, Infanticide, Large-Scale Natural Disaster, Kidnapping, Graphic Depictions of Violence and Injuries, Slavery, Graphic Depictions of Scarification, Grief, Betrayal, Suicide, Torture, Religious Trauma, Drugging, Panic Attacks, Alcohol, Infidelity, Animal Death

A big thank you to the author for the eARC! It just came out this past Saturday on June 7th. While pre-order was only available for the Kindle version, there is now also a paperback version available.

Summary:

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.

My Thoughts:

I stand by everything I said about this book last week when I was only a third of the way through. It is incredibly dark. 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.

June 9 is Now in the Books

Now that we’ve reached June 9 and the celebration we’ve been planning for a year is behind us, I’m hoping to gift myself more reading time. I’ve just started Wildfire by Deb Ellen. You’ll hear about that one next week, and I’ve also got a bunch more ARCs on my list plus an ever-growing physical TBR from all my bookstore adventures. I plan to visit every single one in the state. Since I’m in Massachusetts, I’m lucky enough to have a lot of them. You can join in along with my partner and I in our explorations – we have a whole playlist of bookstore videos for you to check out!

Keep an eye out on my YouTube channel or the main updates page here to follow along on all my bookish adventures. My reading recaps go out on Mondays and bookstore adventure videos go out on Thursdays. Plus, there are lots of little shorts in between. As always, I want to hear from you! What have you been reading lately? Are you having fun with it? Have you read any of these titles, and if so, what did you think of them? Tell me everything, and follow along for more!