Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab
$17 average Amazon, KU NOT supported
Genre: Fantasy
Standalone
Rated 3.95 Average on Goodreads
My Rating: 3 Stars
Snipet
Bury our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab. A standalone fantasy series that has been marketed far and wide by the author. Did this series live up to the hype it was advertised? V.E. Schwab described this book as “Vampires and toxic lesbians”.
Spoiler-Free Plotline
This book follows three points of views: Maria, Alice, and Charlotte. When you start to read, you feel confused about the relevance of characters based on the fact you’re following one from the year 1521 and another in the year 2019. The third point of view isn’t even unlocked until about half way through the book.
In this, Maria, a commoner, is married off per tradition to her husband: Count Andres. In this, the marriage is less than ideal. Marie is pressured to carry his child, finding no relief or fun in intimate moments, and brought down as a person by her husband. Her mother-in-law no better, upset with her son for having married a commoner with no knowledge how to rule. However, the count justifies his decision by the color of Maria’s hair. A bright red, which is normally considered a curse.
Alice is from Ireland, but is studying in college in Boston. She decides to go to a party, where she can reinvent herself as “the new Alice” and break out of her shell. In this, she meets a girl named Lottie with purple hair. They dance, and go back to Alice’s dorm, and Alice wakes up alone the next morning, feeling pretty hungover from the night before.
We are watching the story of Maria and Alice and their new fates given to them in utter confusion, hunger, and an eternity ahead of them.
My Takes
I don’t disagree with V.E. Schwab, as she described this book perfectly: Toxic Vampire Lesbians. I could not have summed it up better myself if I tried.
Overall, that’s about all this book had to offer to me. While I did have a fun time learning about Maria’s backstory and how she managed to achieve freedom, she was drawn to be a villain from the start. I was excited to hear more about her journey and finding out how she became a vampire. Once we got there, she was mainly blood thirsty and downright horny.
If you have not read V.E. Schwab’s other works, you will find that she is not much of a smut writer, which is something I can appreciate about her work and detail in these kinds of books. However, this was about all the personality you will get out of Maria as a vampire. Blood thirsty, and horny. We started to lack some character depth until Charlotte’s perspective.
Alice, was pushed to the side as a character as she tries to track down Lottie. As she woke up feeling confused and rather, sensitive to light. However, she has to find her ways to satisfy her blood thirst, to which she chooses rather unspecific people along the way until she eventually finds her through a mutual friend.
Alice has been having flashbacks of her sister Catty throughout her chapters. She revisits many phone call conversations and other in person memories of her sister and her free spirit. In this, she is often attempting to maintain her “new Alice” facade.
This is also about where Alice’s character depth ends. There isn’t much more about her that was notable to me.
Charlotte, who you will meet later, also lacks a lot of character depth and utilizes her trauma to justify many actions she takes. Overall, she is also just blood thirsty and horny.
I feel like Alice had the most potential to be able to develop as a character, unfortunately, I think Schwab was really aiming for just “Toxic Vampire Lesbians”. She delivered, but that’s about all we had in the box.
None of the three characters really grow. In the end, everyone has suffered in some kind of way and nobody leaves happy in a very unsatisfying way. The whole book to me was just a book. Schwab left this book open with many questions, unrelatable characters, and lack of depth and meaning to the story. It certainly, in the words of my book club, “could have been an email”.
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