narfna posted a review of Bones of Faerie last week that, while not effusive, piqued my interest enough to get me to go through it this week. Now I find myself very nearly in lockstep with the review in question. It feels almost too brief to form anything like a true connection with the characters. The plot is very nearly a perfunctory thing, a road trip here and back again with as little embellishment along the way as possible. The characters are, for the most part, thinly drawn not for the lack of interest or potential for them to grow but simply for the lack of time that we spend with them. The short length of Bones of Faerie is in many ways its greatest detriment.
That it’s a disappointment to admit how little the book is able to set its hooks in is largely thanks to what shining, wicked seeming hooks that they are. The post-apocalyptic world of Bones of Faerie is not quite like anything else I’ve personally read in Young Adult fiction of late. So many apocalyptic stories are a dark mirror cast upon the present, a fable drawn up to warn against the sins of today causing a tomorrow like the one presented. And there is some of that here, with its morals of intolerance and acceptance and standing up to abuse. For the most part however, our world in the wake of a war between faeries and humans is our world regaining something primal that it lost beneath the taming of civilization. Bones of Faerie posits a magic-soaked Earth where the plants fight and devour and bludgeon the scattered remnants of humanity and the wilds are home not only to a cadre of animals that have all become the hunters of man, but to a darkness so thick and oppressive that it becomes a living, malevolent thing. Bones of Faerie exudes danger in its every shadow, even the smallest of them, and it could be absolutely gripping in the right hands.
I’m just not so sure that Simner is those hands. The story on display here, of the teenaged Liza leaving her sheltered, magic-fearing village for the first time, is raw and terrifying and honest when its laid out to its core. Yet the horrors, the fear, and the strength that must be endured are the sorts of things that would inspire fanfiction to sprout from a Saturday morning cartoon. The potential may all be there on the screen or the page, but it’s up to one’s own mind to truly embellish it to a place that they’re satisfied with. A younger reader may well be perfectly happy with the racing swiftness that the book moves through its plot, not particularly minding the lack of introspection or expository conversations that could take you further and further down the dark rabbit hole of a magic-ravaged world, but becoming so easily enamored with the world means I wanted to spend far more time with it, not simply race past it on the way to the finale.
I also have to take umbrage with the manner in which much of the story is told. We learn before long that most people have a talent for some sort of magic or another in specific, and Liza in particular seems to have a gift for seeing things in mirrors or other reflective surfaces. And every time this happens, we see —
Another moment of Liza breathlessly peering at something that she can’t quite understand.
Something even more surreal continues, following that first paragraph after suggesting that Liza saw —
.. and I can’t keep that up, but do get used to it happening more or less constantly, at great length. Liza’s visions feel like padding to an already lean story, and they grow tiresome by their second or third appearance, much less their tenth.
The strength of the world is one that carried me from the beginning to the end of this novel, to the point that I almost hate to feel so down on it overall. While perfunctory and plot-oriented, little of my complaints amount to making the book a bad one. I enjoyed reading it quite a bit, if only for another scrap coming down of how a forest might appear, or what an animal might act like, or more information on the war that preceded the events of the book. There are some genuinely horrifying and thrilling ideas mixed in with the simplicity of the plot itself, not the least of which is the very first chapter’s introduction to Liza’s way of life at the end of her infant sister’s. And perhaps importantly, I feel that short as it may be, there is a complete story here even with sequels out there waiting to be written. While this could very easily feel like the first chapter in a longer tale, the briskness gives way to a feeling of restraint by the end. I’m perfectly satisfied to leave the series here, without pursuing the rest, and that’s a nice feeling to have with a Young Adult series these days. Of course, narfna did say something about reviewing the others, so I may be compelled to continue all the same. With the positive outweighing the negative, I enjoyed the quick jaunt through the magical post-apocalypse overall. I just wish there was more meat on these Bones.