Bone Crier’s Moon, book one in Kathryn Purdie’s Bone Grace series, was released last spring, and with the sequel coming up, I thought this would be a good time for a review.
When I received this shimmery beauty through my Owlcrate subscription, I was instantly drawn to the cover. Charlie Bowater’s art is top-notch, for starters, but the “we might kill each other by the end” expressions on the characters’ faces is perfect.
At a glance, BCM is about a magical family of women who, as part of their coming-of-age, must find and kill their soul mate in order to maintain their hold on the power that allows them to keep the dead from crossing into the world of the living. This story focuses on one of those women, Ailesse, as she embarks on her journey to become the matriarch of the Bone Criers, and Sabine, her best friend, who has little heart for their vicious customs.
This story is a bit different than what you typically get with YA. Despite being a protagonist, Ailesse is more of an antagonist, in that her main purpose for a good chunk of the story is to kill the boy she’s destined to love. Seeing the logic of such an act from her perspective is something I found intriguing, so if it’s something that sounds just as interesting to you, the sequel, Bone Crier’s Dawn, came out at the end of March.
Author of all things fantasy 