Spoiler-free!

Title: The Bone Witch
Author: Rin Chupeco
My Rating: 3.5 stars! ⭐️
Description:
When Tea accidentally resurrects her brother from the dead, she learns she is different from the other witches in her family. Her gift for necromancy means that she’s a bone witch, a title that makes her feared and ostracized by her community. But Tea finds solace and guidance with an older, wiser bone witch, who takes Tea and her brother to another land for training.
In her new home, Tea puts all her energy into becoming an asha-one who can wield elemental magic. But dark forces are approaching quickly, and in the face of danger, Tea will have to overcome her obstacles…and make a powerful choice.

My Review:

I’m quite surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. I’ve seen a fair share of negative reviews about this one, but I think my low expectations made me more surprised than disappointed.

Also, just to add the cherry on top for my reading experience in general…IT GOT ME OUT OF MY 2 MONTH LONG READING SLUMP!

This book has a pretty unique concept. Our main character Tea is a Dark asha, someone who is able to raise the dead. Since it seen as such a morbid thing, they are usually cast off from society and are also known as Bone Witches.

We follow this book from Tea in the future (when she is 17) as well as Tea during her preparation of becoming an asha (being around the ages of 13-16). It was quite compelling to read from this style and it made everything that much more interesting since you wanted to figure out what had happened to Tea.

I really enjoyed the first 100 pages of this novel. Right off the bat I was captivated by the story and the writing style, but it was mostly during the middle of the book where I started to lose focus.

The problems I had with this book were the info-dumps. It got to a point where I couldn’t fully comprehend certain aspects of the asha or all the places they are individually from (and there’s a lot). To me it seemed a little messy, and when the author related back to something, I had to keep flipping back to the beginning to understand the context of it.

Plus there were a lot of descriptions…pages and pages.

I also wasn’t fully attached to the characters. Unlike the plot, which had me flying through this book, I felt the characters (specifically our main character) lacked a connection with me as the reader. Tea felt a little generic to me, and she closely reminded me of how I felt with Jules in the book Everless, which isn’t exactly positive.

In the case with this first book, I definitely feel like the plot and the storyline are a lot more effective than the characters. But it’s also really nice to know that a lot of people enjoy the second book even more, which gives me hope for some amazing development with the characters.

I have high hopes for the sequel, especially with how this book ended off, and I really think the story will start moving a lot more faster!

Overall, I’d say go read this book! It’s different from all the other YA books I’ve been reading recently, and it definitely has a darker feel to it! It’s also an easy book to fly through!

Thanks for reading!
-Ashley