Review: Your Blood And Bones by J. Patricia Anderson
Blurb:
Kill the monsters when they’re found.
No matter who they used to be.
The girl with secret feathers in her skin and strange bones jutting out beneath her clothes is resigned to her fate. Her deformities mark her a monster and the stories say monsters must die.
When her family finds out and turns on her, a village boy saves her and leads her on a frantic escape. The girl believes her death has merely been delayed—until he mentions a cure.
With the world against them and the monstrous change progressing, they must cross water, forest, and field to chase the rumor that fuels their desperate hope. But is hope enough to keep them going?
Review:
I signed up to receive a free ARC of this novella in exchange for an honest review.
Right off the bat, the book is hella creepy. The atmosphere snatches you away to this dark world as you follow the protagonists (an unnamed girl and an unnamed boy) running away from a mob. The creepiness intensifies as their truths are slowly revealed.
The girl and the boy are both humans in the process of transforming into monsters. As would be possible in a primitive society, they are hunted to be killed by their fellow villagers because turning into a monster is essentially a death sentence, a curse that the villagers do not want lurking about. But, the boy has heard of a cure, and that tiny hope takes the protagonists on a journey that is relatively short and straightforward, but full of emotional ups and downs, empathetically exploring their psyche as they slowly come to terms with their situation.
The very first thing I noticed was the atmosphere. Anderson has done a fantastic job of creating the atmosphere of that rainy night when our protagonists are running for their lives. I could feel the cold wind against my skin, feel the rains drenching me as our protagonists got onto their weird raft (I’d rather you find out what I mean by yourselves, I don’t want to take away the experience). Everything is so beautifully written that Anderson will immerse you in the ugliness of her world and its characters.
This book is the opposite of a feel-good cosy fantasy. It’s uncomfortable to read, with all the body horror, suffering, and mental turmoil our protagonists are subjected to. While you don’t really get much of the characters’ personalities and past, save for their monster transformations, they feel very much like real people stuck in a very unreal yet devastating situation. Despite the wavering hope, there is a perpetual drive to survive, to keep pushing for that thin sliver of hope which dangles in the distance. With all that the protagonists have been through, you want them to succeed, to get the cure they set out to find.
Lastly, the prose. The author mentioned in the afterword that she was inspired to write this book after listening to ‘Your Bones’ by ‘Of Monsters and Men’. When I read that, everything started to make so much sense. I love Of Monsters and Men, and now that I have that piece of information, I can easily imagine them using this novella to visualise a song of theirs. The visual absurdity, the lyrical prose, the visceral exploration of the characters, all weaves together to form a brilliantly bittersweet experience.
If you like slow-moving narratives that focus on the characters and their inner dialogue, lyrical and atmospheric prose, I cannot recommend this book enough!
TL;DR:
What I liked: atmospheric settings, lyrical prose, visceral exploration of the characters, body horror, absurd imagination
What I didn’t Like: some portions and descriptions felt a little repetitive, but not enough to spoil the overall experience
