The Bone Carver by Monique Snyman: Review
Right before the book's release tomorrow, welcome to the blog tour stop at my little corner of the internet! I would like to extend so much thanks to Monique Snyman and the Good Choice Reading team for choosing me for this occasion!
Before I jump into the info, I would like to inform you that I received an eARC of The Bone Carver for free in exchange for my review!
For a small New England town, Shadow Grove has an uncanny ability to attract the worst kind of trouble. Not that the residents are too concerned about the various horrors living among them.
As the leaves change color and the weather grows colder, a foul presence is making itself known by leaving peculiar gifts for the students of Ridge Crest High. At first, the presents seem harmless—and a rash of accidents seem coincidental—but when seniors Rachel Cleary and her Scottish cousin, Dougal Mackay, find a boneless body in the boiler room, things take an ominous turn.Something vicious is on the loose in Shadow Grove, but with Orion Nebulius gone, Rachel has little hope of anyone getting out alive.
About the author
Monique Snyman’s mind is a confusing bedlam of glitter and death, where candy-coated gore is found in abundance and homicidal unicorns thrive. Sorting out the mess in her head is particularly irksome before she’s ingested a specific amount of coffee, which is equal to half the recommended intake of water for humans per day. When she’s not playing referee to her imaginary friends or trying to overdose on caffeine, she’s doing something with words—be it writing, reading, or editing.
Monique Snyman lives in Pretoria, South Africa, with her husband and an adorable Chihuahua. She’s the author of the Bram Stoker Award® nominated novel, THE NIGHT WEAVER, which is the first installment.
Review
(Warning: The Night Weaver spoilers live beyond this point! If you want the events of the first book to remain a surprise, which I highly recommend, wait until you've read The Night Weaver! However, there are no spoilers for The Bone Carver.)
Allow me to sum up my thoughts on this book with a single image:
Because WOW. Did this book leave me baffled (in a good way.)
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's go back to the beginning. This book starts with Shadow Grove and our protagonist, Rachel Cleary, still recovering from the horrific attack of the powerful Black Annis known as the Night Weaver, yet refusing to acknowledge it, and Rachel herself quietly missing her pretty, pretty fae prince, Orion. Yet even that can't distract her from the two most terrifying things in the world: standardized tests and college prep. Which brings up an interesting point that I somehow failed to notice until reading this, the second book of the series: Snyman is really good at blending real-life terrors with imaginary horrors. In the last book it was children being kidnapped, in this one it's anxiety and stalkers, and both share maybe the scariest thing for any average teen: the adults in their life being unable or unwilling to help, leaving them alone to deal with a world turning sideways.
It doesn't take long for this book to get creepy, with Rachel first panicking and skipping out of an SAT and finding her way to the bathroom, where a girl is having a seizure and a horrifying find awaits: the exact likeness of the girl in her seizure carved into a bone.
Thus begins our horror: Shadow Grove is being haunted by a creature that carves omens out of bones, promising horrific accidents on those whose likenesses it carves, and even worse: extracting bones from its victims' bodies. Yes, that is as terrifying as it sounds. Yes, I loved every word of it. With the tough old Miss Crenshaw hospitalized after her own bone effigy was carved, Rachel and her Scottish cousin Dougal are left alone to handle Shadow Grove's new haunt... until, with the help of a witch (because there are witches now! I could hardly contain my excitement!) Rachel goes to the faerie world to find Orion and beg for his help.
All throughout the book, the sense of creepiness and encroaching horror never fades. Even when Rachel is in the faerie world, Orthega, and far away from the beast dubbed The Bone Carver, she's still in danger from worse things still that have yet to enter the human world, and the faerie world has plenty of horrors to offer. It's full of uncertainty, of constant, bone-chilling fear of running into something that she can't outrun or outwit. All of the characters are extremely flawed, and they all have their limits. What I love is that not only do those limits exist, but they don't just come up out of nowhere. They creep up on you, straining on the characters until they're ready to snap and run away.
On the subject of the characters, I'd really like to take a moment to appreciate Rachel Cleary. So, so often I read books where the main character isn't fit to navigate their way down a single straight hall, but Rachel is clever. She knows how to keep herself alive, and how to draw conclusions on her own. This isn't to say she's perfect, of course. She needs help sometimes, and she has flaws that she gets called out for. She fails and carries on, and she sometimes even wants to give up. She's also so empowered and completely unapologetic about it. She tells it how it is, and she gets what she wants, and that's just how she is. Reading from her perspective made me feel a little stronger.
Without saying too much, Snyman also shows off another storytelling talent of hers here: fairy tales. I can't say much about the tale itself without spoiling something pretty major, but the shift in her prose style when she writes it is perfect. Her usual style is fast-paced and present-tense, which works well for her style of horror, but the fairy tale is quiet, the horror lying underneath rather than rising to the surface, and it moves slowly, as fairy tales do. It gives you time to draw connections to the main story as you read it.
The pacing remains a little weird, but I still love the progression of the plot. Even in the midst of the scariest parts, there are still moments for us to take a breath, relax, and then have all that relaxation thrown away when oops, there's another thing that is completely and utterly terrifying.
Lastly, the ending will leave you with my exact sentiments from before: I don't need sleep. I need answers.
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