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Book Review: The Bone Orchard

I've been on a Nora Roberts kick for the last few weeks, which has slowed my fantasy and sci-fi reading considerably. For some unknown reason, I found The Bone Orchard (2022) by Sara A. Mueller shelved in with the Nora books. I took it as the sign it was. 

I enjoyed a lot about this book: The smart women and the way they distributed their anger. The world building that felt familiar and yet completely different from anything else I'd read. The reveals all landed perfectly well--Mueller dripped information along the reader's path so I could guess the answer a handful of pages before the characters, which is always so satisfying. 

At the beginning of the book I was worried that this would be like Gideon all over again, in the sense that there was a lot happening and I felt like I had to keep re-reading things to catch the meaning, only to see that I'd read it right the first time. As a reader it made me question whether I was smart enough to follow along. I had a hard time at first following the large set of characters and the just-shy of nonsensical rules that governed the world. While the world building was one of the things that I enjoyed most about the book, I think the book could have done with just a shade more detail so that I wasn't second-guessing myself quite so much. By the end that had mostly settled out, and I felt more at ease following the logical jumps that were not quite explicit on the page. Again, maybe this is actually just a post-covid brain problem of mine and not due to anything about the book. 

Finally, it did feel like this book was trying to say a lot. There were a lot of solid, weighty lines scattered throughout, but I had a hard time following the theme of them. I wonder if that is an artifact of it taking 10 years to write, and the author herself going through a decade of life and lessons in that time. I always love a good weighty line, but I wanted them to feel more cohesive. 

Overall, I really enjoyed this book and would definitely read more from this author. 

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