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Laurel Early has lived a simple life on her family farm in Kentucky. She had thought to get away by attending college, but she has just dropped out and is back home. Her uncle tells her she’s an adult, so it’s time to get to work. Making a living means growing and harvesting tobacco and keeping up with all the other work on the property. Laurel also does taxidermy and collects bones, cleaning them and making them into jewelry or other items. A little magic manifests in her as she holds them: sometimes, she can feel how the creature died.
Her mother, Anna, on the other hand, worked stronger magic: “whatever field she slipped her fingers into always produced a good yield.” But Anna was hated and envied by her community. And then she’d fallen to her death in a well on the property when Laurel was just a baby.
Laurel isn’t a favorite in the community, either, but she does have her best friends, all young men. And she knows one of them could really pin her down into a predictable life if she let him (she does long to let him sometimes…).
Then a horrible creature made of bones — from Laurel’s collection — starts to terrorize her. A devil who haunted her mother is back for Laurel. The only way to save herself and those she loves is to figure out the truth of what Anna did years before and find a way to unravel it. That includes tapping into deeper magic than she knew she was capable of.
Wake the Bones definitely has elements of Southern Gothic. Elizabeth Kilcoyne writes lush descriptions of the town and countryside and the magic that resides there. The interactions between the characters are also layered, thick, and rich with meaning. Quite often she comes at things sideways, whether in dialogue or in her prose, like a good Southerner, and it’s so roundabout that too often her meaning is obscure. I re-read a number of passages several times, trying to be sure I understood what was meant. But I felt the meaning slipping away from my grasp, so I was a bit confused here and there. The prose felt sometimes as thick as the humidity she writes about, and I think it would have benefited from a few “drier spells,” so to speak, to enable more clarity.
It’s a well-written young adult book, and I’m sure people who love Southern Gothic will eat it up, but it wasn’t fully to my taste.
Rated: High. Profanity includes almost 20 uses of strong language, about 15 instances of moderate profanity, 25 to 30 uses of mild language, and 15 to 20 instances of the name of Deity in vain. Sexual content includes kissing and one brief scene that involves a few details and then cuts to “black.” Violence includes shooting of guns, a lot of blood and description of gore, and attacks by monsters. The author writes at the beginning that thematic material includes “mental and physical abuse, violence, and suicide. Additionally, the book includes dental trauma, guns, postpartum depression, drug usage, animal death, and blood.”
*I received an ARC in exchange for my honest review.
