“For them,” he says, gesturing at the busy city, “age takes its toll in decades. For us, it is the work of centuries. And it is not measured in wrinkles or gray hair. Where others rot without, we rot within.” He raps his knuckles against his chest. “We are hollowed, bit by bit, as all that made us human dies. Our kindness. Our empathy. Our capacity for fear, and love. One by one they slough away, until all that’s left is the desire to hunt, to hurt, to feed, to kill. That is how we die. Made reckless by our hunger. Convinced we are unkillable until someone or something proves us wrong.”
page 214, Matteo, Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab
Table of Contents
Preamble
I am no stranger to V.E. Schwab’s work, I have read Vicious, the Shades of Magic trilogy, and The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue – that last book I loved enough to purchase a physical copy of it which sits on my bookshelf.
So when I first heard about her latest book, Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil I was a little skeptical at first. The premise didn’t seem like something that would be up my alley. Despite my skepticism I went ahead and put in a hold for it in the library system as I had not read a V.E. Schwab book that I had not enjoyed. The hold arrived just before I left for my vacation in Montreal so I read it after I returned home.
A minor critique of the book’s cover design – I am not a fan of what I presume is a custom typeface used for the title of the book and the author’s name. I don’t have the verbiage required to critique typefaces but to me it feels unbalanced, uneven – some letters being much wider than others. It just bothers me.
With that out of the way, let’s get into the book itself.
The Book
Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil tells its story from multiple POVs, three to be exact. The three characters being – Maria/Sabine, Charlotte, Alice. The book also jumps around in time in each POV and is structured in a non-chronological way. Alice’s sections also include memory/flashback sections where she recalls a memory from her childhood involving her sister.
This is where my problems with this book start. I don’t mind a multiple POV story or a multi timeline story. The problem here is that I just don’t like one of the POVs present in the book. Specifically Alice, I just find her to be rather dull as a character and the book’s attempts to flesh out her character using flashback sequences from her childhood falls flat. I found myself skimming through those sequences.
That brings us to another problem I have with this book. I didn’t find myself getting invested in any of the characters. Sure, I liked Sabine’s perspective more than I did Charlotte or Alice but ultimately I still didn’t particularly find her interesting enough to care. The book’s side characters are more interesting – Matteo, Ezra, Renata – I found myself wanting to know more about these characters but the book just didn’t give me enough of them to sink my teeth into.
As I have said in many a book review in the past, I am a very character driven person when it comes to the novels I read. I can forgive a weak/middling plot if I love the characters in it. Unfortunately for this book, it does not have intriguing characters or a good plot. The only thing that saved this book from being a DNF for me is that I continue to have a strong affinity for V.E. Schwab’s writing style. The prose here is beautiful, poetic in places.
Thematically, this book bears a passing resemblance to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, namely this is another book that deals with the subject of death and immortality. I don’t think there is anything novel that V.E. Schwab explores with that topic in this book and when it comes to the topic of vampirism and immortality, I think Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice does a much better job of exploring that theme.
The other big theme present throughout the book is about toxic relationships and cycle of abuse. I don’t think the book does a particularly good job of exploring this theme and in a certain case, it feels like the book thinks the reader doesn’t understand that that is one of the major themes of the book and one of the characters makes an explicit reference to the phrase “hurt people hurt people” and “cycles of abuse”. I don’t think that was necessary, the book isn’t subtle with its presentation of this theme.
Furthermore, the way the book does the conclusions of its various character arcs left much to be desired and I think it had a negative impact on the overall quality of the book. Without getting into spoilers, the end of certain character arcs felt either rushed and anticlimactic or just a little too neat and tidy for a story that revolves around three very messy lesbian vampires.
Conclusions
Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil was a miss for me. I can safely say that this is now the V.E. Schwab novel I have enjoyed the least. The book did not have any main characters I cared about, one character that I just disliked reading the POV of and a middling to bad plot written in beautiful prose. Unfortunately for this book, just beautiful prose isn’t enough for me to consider a book good.
I will continue to read any new books V.E. Schwab puts out as I find her ideas and concepts to be intriguing and I like her writing style. The execution of the various themes present in this book left much to be desired. The book brings in themes of immortality, desire, and queerness but none of it comes to anything in the end. I was left hungry.
That’s all from me. See y’all in the next one.
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