The Bone Houses by Emily Lloyd-Jones — book review

The Bone Houses is a delightfully creepy and atmospheric book that makes for a quick and entertaining read.

“The things that crawled from the lake were sinew and rotting flesh. They were silent, with hollow eyes and bodies that caved in.
They were called bone houses.”

The story follows a quest of sorts in a medieval-inspired fantasy setting. Although the landscape is vaguely

 

reminiscent of Wales, the world in The Bone Houses is a unique product of Emily Lloyd-Jones’s imagination and therefore isn’t tied down or restricted by historical accuracy.
The novel opens in the quite literally ‘off the map’ village of Colbren. Seventeen-year-old Aderyn, who goes by Ryn, is the daughter of the village’s gravedigger. After her father’s disappearance and her mother’s death, Ryn, alongside her younger siblings, struggles to make ends meet. The graveyard isn’t doing too well as most of the villagers are aware of the rumours of the ‘bone house‘, the dead who don’t stay dead, so they prefer to cremate their loved ones, Ryn spends her days loitering in the forest, and finds herself in more than occasion face to face with a ‘bone house’. Thankfully for Ryn, her trusted companion happens to be an axe which she can use with skilful dexterity, especially when in peril.
The arrival of a stranger in the village, a young aspiring map-maker, provides Ryn with the opportunity to venture into the forest and to see if the ‘bone houses’ are indeed the result of a decade-old curse.
The two main protagonist were both compelling in their own ways. They each had their own distinctive personality with character arc. Their relationship progressed at a slow yet convincing pace.
The novel has a surprisingly amount of humour, so that there are many moments when the characters’ banter or a dark joke adds an entertaining note to some of the more action or suspenseful oriented scenes.
Emily Lloyd-Jones’ writing style resonated with the fairy tale gone wrong atmosphere of her novel. Her prose is that of a storyteller whose careful pace and use of repetition gives a delightful rhythm to her story.

“When the man said the cauldron would make his fortune, people laughed at him.
The man was right.
Terribly, horribly right.”

The curse and Ryn’s quest reminded me a bit of The Black Cauldron, except instead of a pig with have a very stubborn goat who accompanies our heroes in their journey to break this curse. There is also a certain Over the Garden Wall quality to it that makes it into a rather perfect Halloween read.
While I enjoyed the story and characters I think that the tone of the book was a bit too middle-grade for me…maybe if I’d read this believing that it had indeed been marketed as MG I wouldn’t have hoped to read of a story with more horror or darker content.

My rating: ★★★✰✰ 3.25 stars

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