Good Morning World!

You made it to Friday. Congrats on your hard-earned victory! May the world tremble at your might and success!

Please excuse my rampant optimism. I’m just happy because my last day at work was yesterday and this is my extra day off before my new job starts on Monday.

Anywho, I’ve been doing a buddy read the past few days and am sharing my individual review.

This time it’s The Bone Garden by Heather Kassner.

This is my first buddy read with Gigi aka The Beachy Reader. We used GoodReads’ nifty little Compare Books tool that I learned from Misty’s Book Space and went for this one.

Gigi and I both love the spooky and the MG/YA fiction, so it wasn’t hard to find something to agree on.

Like I said earlier, this is my individual review of the book, soon to be followed by a Buddy Read and Rant with Gigi, so stay tuned for that post sometime later today or possibly tomorrow.

Alright, let’s get the show started!

Blurb:

“Remember, my dear, you do not really and truly exist.”

Made of dust and bone and imagination, Irréelle fears she’s not quite real. Only the finest magical thread tethers her to life—and to Miss Vesper. But for all her efforts to please her cruel creator, the thread is unraveling. Irréelle is forgetful as she gathers bone dust. She is slow returning from the dark passages beneath the cemetery. Worst of all, she is unmindful of her crooked bones.

When Irréelle makes one final, unforgivable mistake by destroying a frightful creature just brought to life, Miss Vesper threatens to imagine her away once and for all. Defying her creator for the very first time, Irréelle flees to the underside of the graveyard and embarks on an adventure to unearth the mysterious magic that breathes bones to life, even if it means she will return to dust and be no more.

With echoes of Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, debut author Heather Kassner crafts a gorgeously written story humming with magic, mystery, and dark imaginings.

GoodReads

The Review:

I gave this book two and a half stars.

I was really disappointed with this reading experience overall.

In a nutshell, this book is about a girl named Irreele who was created by a strangely powerful woman Miss Vesper. Miss Vesper is cruel, relentless, and rules over her actions with an iron fist. When she threatens to destroy Irreele, she runs away to escape her clutches.

Many things didn’t work for me in this book, but the things that really did were the concept and ambience of Irreele’s world.

This book reminded me of a mix of Frankenstein and Coraline, and that intrigued me from the get go. The scenery around Irreele is dark and dreary, my fave! I loved the spooky ambience.

Unfortunately that’s where most of the positives end for me.

At its core, I felt that the characters suffered a bit, especially the MC Irreele. Irreele felt extremely vanilla to me. Her voice didn’t really pop off the page for me, and I honestly was getting bored. Her personality didn’t completely make sense to me.

Yes, she is a victim, and there is no right way to cope with abuse, but Irreele’s neverending love for Miss Vesper didn’t make sense. There’s no real basis for this love. All Miss Vesper has ever done is treat her like crap, so why would she feel that way towards her? If she was sired in a way like with vampires, that should’ve been explained.

I also felt she was a bit too naïve and innocent, even for a middle grade novel. I wanted her to have some guts and stand up for herself, but in the instances where she does kind of pull that off, it was lackluster for me.

Guy’s personality was honestly quite a bit more interesting than Irreele, and I probably would’ve enjoyed this more through his POV.

The plot at first was intriguing, but the slow pacing of things just really dragged for me. The characters had a chance to hightail it outta there, but didn’t and I had a hard time understanding why.

The writing was okay, but I felt no real emotional connection from reading this book.

All in all, I cannot recommend this book. The characters, plot, and overall writing just felt too bland and didn’t make sense. But you never know unless you try, right? Perhaps this book may work for you. It just didn’t work for me. On to the next one!

That’s a Wrap!

Thanks for stopping by, and happy reading!

Have you read this book before? What did you think? Do you have a book recommendation similar to this one? Feel free to share in the comments!

If you’d like to see other reviews of mine, feel free to check out the book review section of my blog or my GoodReads. You can also follow my GoodReads reviews here. There are some great binge-worthy books on there!

Have a great day!

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