Hi everyone. Welcome back to Bibliophilia Book Reviews.
Today I’m going to review The Bone Houses by Emily Lloyd-Jones. This book was released on September 24th, 2019 and it has become very popular among young adult readers (as well as avid adult fantasy readers) in the months since. Click here for a brief description or synopsis. This review has spoilers.
I first found out about this book when it was featured in a young adult subscription book box. By then, it had already been out for a couple of months and its star was on the rise within the book community. So I decided to give it a try. Unfortunately, I did not like it as much as I thought I would. There were, however, some positives and I will talk about those first before going into specifics on negatives.
The Bone Houses by Emily Lloyd-Jones is a YA fantasy and horror novel about a young girl, Ryn—short for Aderyn—,who has inherited her family’s gravedigging business after her mother dies and her father goes missing. Living with her two younger siblings and uncle, who, incidentally, has also not been seen for several days, Ryn is struggling to pay the bills and keep her family fed because the village she lives in is quickly running out of people to bury and the villagers are now deciding to cremate their dead instead of burying them. After all, the people are afraid of the curse of the bone houses, or walking dead, that plagues the village; afraid that their dead will become bone houses if they too are buried. And the bone houses seem to have increased in number and to attack the village more frequently after the arrival of Ellis, a young and mysterious mapmaker that Ryn finds in the forest. On a mission to map the area, he offers Ryn a job and she, desperate for the money, agrees to prevent him from getting lost in the area. Thus begins their search and adventure in defeating the bone houses attacking the village.
The evening air smelled pleasantly of a fresh grave. Ryn breathed it in-the sweetness of overturned sod, mists rising from the green grass, and the woodsmoke drifting from the village. The spade felt comfortable in her hands, slotted in amidst familiar calluses. She hacked at the damp earth, dislodging rocks and thin roots. She’d marked the outline of the grave with twine and nails, and now it was just a matter of cutting through greenery and topsoil.
Here is what I liked about this book:
The main topic of the book. Surprisingly, this book isn’t about death, as the synopsis would like to make you think, but family. This is seen in the relationship between Ryn and her siblings as well as Ryn and her father, on the one side, and Ellis trying to find out who his parents are, and where he is from, on the other. It’s interesting to note that this also marks a stark difference between the two main characters. Ryn’s relationship with her father, for example, defines who she is. It is because of him that she knows who she is. A gravedigger, and a gravedigger’s daughter. And knowing that gives her peace; she accepts it. Ellis, on the other hand, does not know who he is because he never knew who his parents were, and has been searching for them all his life (and by extension, himself). This was an interesting contrast between the two protagonists of the story.
The relationship between the living and the dead. This is where the element of horror that the classification of the book refers to comes in. The bone houses, or walking dead, are heavily linked with the magic system of the book, and the story behind them was one of the aspects of the book that I liked the most. In the end, they too drove the main plot of the book—the search for family—something that is not usually associated with the dead, if ever. This is something that I really liked. The dead are not evil, but also in search of those that they left behind because they too have suffered a loss with their own death and have lost loved ones: the living that they cannot go back to.
Now I will talk about what I did not like:
The romantic relationship between Ryn and Ellis: Though this is something that I expected from the beginning of the book, with a friends-to-lovers trope, I thought the book was too short for it to develop the romantic relationship between the two protagonists to my liking. The relationship “evolves” from friends to lovers in one short sentence at the end of the book making it feel almost like an afterthought…something like, “Oh yeah, and now they’re together” sorta, kinda, thing. I would have liked the author to show us more of how they became first friends and then lovers to make it more believable. But I also understand that this is not supposed to be a romance heavy book and adding more to that storyline would have probably not added much to the plot and could’ve possibly detracted some readers from the book altogether, but still. I didn’t like how this was just added at the end in a single sentence.
The writing. I was not a big fan of the writing style in this book. Though it is a young adult book, and by definition it should be accessible to younger readers, I felt that it was also rather simple at times and that deterred me from wanting to keep reading. There were many times when I thought about not finishing the book…the writing just didn’t do anything for me to keep me interested. If anything, it bored and detached me from both the story and plot (though I didn’t really want to use the use the word bored here though it is the only word that describes best how I felt).
I Did Not Like This Book. Though very popular, I did not see where all the hype was coming from honestly. I’m glad I read it, but it is not a book I will put on my re-read TBR pile.
