Reviews with content warning for Blood - Your Blood, My Bones

I wanted to love this sooooooo badly!!!!
The Whispering Dark was one of my favorite books of 2022 and was a knockout debut. Sadly, this sophomore novel was a slump for me, and I am crushed.

The ideas were there, the atmosphere were there, but I think it needed tightening up, and more clarity on the magic system and dynamics between the main characters. I kept losing track of who was 'good' and who was 'evil' - and no it's not because they were morally gray, I was trying to keep track of motives and why anybody was doing what they were doing. Also a character had two names, I think? I thought it was a narrator inconsistancy but then later on it was clear that no, he had two variations of his name. And who was I supposed to be rooting for romance wise? I think it was a love triangle but I am actually not sure.

Also, the similarities to The Raven Boys were SO STRONG that I couldn't help but compare it and since Raven Boys is one of my all time fav series, this one didn't have a chance.
(farm setting, dead parents, weird magic, curses, barn-set, love triangle, undead animals, twisted friend groups, sentient environment)

ANYWAY I hope the next one is better.

Content Warnings

tnemelce's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

Content Warnings

alatedbibliophile's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.5

arc disclosure
I received an advanced copy of this book to give my honest review. Everything in this review is written in my own words for no other compensation than the e-copy of this book. For more information on my review policy, click here.

intro
This was my first read by Kelly Andrew. I have to admit, the cover immediately drew me in, and then I read the blurb and knew I had to read it. Fantasy? Check. Creepy aesthetic? Check. Friends-to-enemies-to-lovers vibes? Check, check, check!

So, did this book live up to the hype I built up in my head?

thoughts
This book was [mostly] a pleasant surprise. It was wonderfully written with some lovely prose that I greatly enjoyed reading. I love fantasy and paranormal, so the premise of this story was right up my alley.

I’m not really sure what my final thoughts are on this book. I enjoyed it, but it had a few issues. For one, just like some other reviewers have said, I felt like it was too long for the amount of story that was included. I also wish the past and present timelines were a little more clear, because jumping between the two was incredibly confusing.

Peter’s story line was super intriguing, but I wish it’d been more fleshed out. The only answers we got for sure were that he was an immortal and it was because of a deal his dad made. And he was somehow from among the stars, but we have no context of his homeland nor do we understand why his dad made this deal in the first place other than they were starving. But why were they starving? What happened to this “home among the stars?” I think this may be alluding to a super loose inspiration from Peter Pan, but I wish we had a little more answers and some more details so we could understand the motivation better.

bullet points

the monsters in this book were genuinely creepy and a couple times what I was reading gave me a chill I wasn’t expecting!
Peter was a walking red flag and I loved it.
since I didn’t read the first book Kelly wrote, I had no prior attachments to or expectations for Wyatt’s friends and the way they were introduced to this book was kind of jarring. They were just all of the sudden there. Maybe if I’d read the other book, it wouldn’t have felt so out of the blue, I’m not sure.
this has no merit to the story whatsoever, but this is absolutely one of my favorite covers ever. It’s gorgeous!

final thoughts
Overall, I enjoyed this book as a whole, but I’ve gotta admit…the ending almost ruined it for me. Oftentimes the ending will either make or break a book, and this one kind of broke the book in my opinion. This will not be a re-read. Honestly, if I’d known how the book was going to end, I probably wouldn’t have ever picked it up to begin with. If you have book ending anxiety, I have a spoiler tag below that you can click on. Otherwise, that’s all I’m going to say about it. (I took the spoilers out of this review. If you want to read them, feel free to visit my blog)

The first half of this book was absolutely worth the read and I don’t regret it. The angst, the first love, the will-they/won’t-they, the sort of love-to-hate-back-to-love emotions, the creepy atmosphere, the crazy powers…all of that was great and based on that, I would have thought this book was going to become one of my favorite reads of the year.

Unfortunately…

I keep going between 3 stars or a little higher…because if I were basing my rating purely on the ending, I would’ve given it a 1. This is the kind of ending I hate and avoid like the plague. However, in the end I decided to rate this book as 3 stars, maybe even 3.5, because I did think it was beautifully written, the story as a whole was great, and I hope the author continues to write many more books in the future.

And as always, if this book sounds appealing to you, please do not hesitate to pick it up and read it for yourself. This is simply my own authentic opinion 🙂

Thank you, NetGalley and Kelly Andrew for the e-ARC of this book!

final rating
3/5

Read my original review here: https://alatedbibliophile.com/arc-review-your-blood-my-bones-by-kelly-andrew/

Content Warnings

nikki_saulnier's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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nostoat's review against another edition

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5.0

They'd dreamed together. They'd fought together. And eventually - reluctantly - they'd grown together.

"You're mine. You and Peter. You always have been." / "People don't belong to people." / "Don't they? I take care of what's mine."

He could only remember James. The way he laughed, lit from beneath by a firefly glow. He could only remember Wyatt, and the way the skies thundered when he kissed her that first impossible time.

This book hit me in the same place that remembering reading Narnia, watching Little Woman (2019), and watching my nieces and nephews grow up while contemplating the flow of my own life between my fingers does. Which is to say, it hit me in the gut with all the force of a freight train with emotions about childhood, growing up, leaving it all behind, being haunted by the ghosts of the past good and bad and complicated. It doesn't matter how grey the skies were, the golden moments of joy still ache like taking a bite of fresh from the freezer ice cream. I feel it in my teeth, in my bones, in my soul. This book is one long "you can't go back, god, you can't go back, you just can't ever go back."

It's also a story about three people so deeply deeply entangled, it's as though the green sap of Willow Heath runs through all their veins. It's always the three of them, you see. There is hate, there is anger, there is violence and blood and crying and kissing. And at the end of it all there they are. What relationship between three people who grew up under the heavy thumb of a strange, pressing ritual guild could possibly come out normal in the wash? Their hands are bloody for each other; their arms locked in an embrace nothing could possibly break. Is it romance? Sure I guess. I don't know. I'm aromantic. To me, this is simply the deepest well of devotion that could possibly exist; bigger than romance. Deeper than romance.

There is so much pain in this book, but there is also power. Andrew, in my opinion, balances the power dynamics so deftly on a knife's edge. It's thrilling. It's delicious. I felt like I was reading a feast spread just for me.

Content Warnings

sol_journal's review against another edition

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medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

**Thank you so much Scholastic Press and Kelly Andrew for the arc! All words and thoughts in this review are my own honest opinion!**

Posted to: NetGalley, Goodreads, and The Storygraph

Posted on: 27 April 2024

3.7 (rounded up to4) out of 5 stars.

Phew, okay this took me much too long to get to and even longer still to finish. I feel like if this book had been with me more consistently, I may have been less critical of it? And I say this lightly because it still got 4 stars based off my rating scale, but I have a lot of thoughts floating around about it.

To start, this isn’t my first Kelly Andrew book. I got a copy of ‘The Whispering Dark’ when it first released (I received it through Illumicrate and my sister through OwlCrate so we buddy read it). It was never finished though, and this was before I knew about DNF’ing, book slumps, reading slumps- all that jazz. So when I saw this title and read the bio, I was a little worried about trying another Kelly Andrew book since I hadn’t finished the first one. I’m really glad I read this though, because while I have my qualms about it, it was a really lovely read!

On a more critical note, the characters sometimes had annoying habits. There were also times where they fell a little flat to me or just lacked a little something that would’ve made their role in the story hit *more*.

Another thing was that I think I got lost a bit in the plot? Some things happened that kind of felt awkwardly placed or solutions just given for the sake of finding an out??

Again, it took me longer to read this book than usual, so I feel like I’ll have different opinions on this when I go back to read it and actually finish it in my usual reading time (a week, give or take. Not a whole month..)

What I *loved* about this book was the writing in some places. It was pretty, it was meaningful, it added a little depth to the flatness I found. I saved a lot of quotes from this because there was just *something* about the rotting, about the decay, and how Andrew describes it. The writing style wasn’t one of my favorites, but the things being written were- does that make sense?

Overall, it was a nice read! I did enjoy it, and I did decide to keep my OwlCrate copy of it. I think the magic used was also interesting to me, but at the heart of it, the struggles and the growth of the main cast had me.

Content Warnings

dani_reis's review against another edition

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dark emotional slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

Content Warnings

natashaleighton_'s review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

House of Hollow meets Starling House in this dark and enchantingly lush, Gothic Fantasy standalone that’s set within the same world as The Whispering Dark. A tale of curses, eldritch creatures and the fallibility of humankind, but also of friendships, loyalty and the difficult choices we all must to make. Kelly Andrew has crafted a gorgeously imaginative and immersive tale that needs to be sent to Guillermo del Toro, cause I need an adaptation of this ASAP!

When her father dies and leaves her everything, Wyatt Westlock finally returns to Willow Heath, the farmhouse she spent her childhood summers in… with a plan to burn it all to the ground.

Until she stumbles upon her childhood best friend, Peter, strung up in the basement and left for dead. For unbeknownst to her, Peter is immortal; and only his ritualistic murder (at the hands of generations of Wyatt’s family) can hold back the eldritch creatures, who’ve spent centuries trying to invade her world.

But Peter doesn’t want to be the sacrificial lamb anymore, he plans to break his curse by killing the last ever Westlock… which unfortunately happens to be Wyatt.

With the property’s wards unravelling, Wyatt must turn to the only person who can help her repair them before it’s too late. Yet, despite Peter being the only one who knows how to harness her volatile magic, can Wyatt truly put her trust in a boy who’s sworn to destroy her?

I loved how intricately detailed and otherworldly in scope this was! Kelly Andrew’s hauntingly poetic yet slightly macabre prose reads like a dark, twisted fairytale — in the best, creepiest and most sinister way possible.

The terrifying sense of foreboding that we encounter from the very start, and which stalks our protagonists throughout the entire novel (from high stakes action scenes to the more emotional and introspective ones) really amplified the gothic horror elements that I thought made this such an intriguing story.

But, I do think it was the nuance and depth of our POV characters, Wyatt and Peter; their flaws, emotional ties and uncertain loyalties to each other in the face of such horrifying adversity that really made this a standout read for me.

I loved Wyatt whose emotional complexity and journey after discovering her family’s darkest secrets (and trying to make amends) had me utterly invested in her every decision. I enjoyed the depth and emotion we explore in morally grey Peter too. His traumatic experiences and conflicted emotions surrounding Wyatt were breathtakingly wrought, highlighting just how important (and life changing) the bonds of friendship can truly be.

And the romance was phenomenal as well! Slowburn, swoon-worthy and deliciously intense, I was awed by just how much chemistry Wyatt and Peter had. Even in the flashback scenes of their childhood we get glimpses of their growing feelings and I loved every second. Though I do warn it’s quite an emotional and bittersweet journey so do prepare to shed some tears along the way.

If you’ve read The Whispering Dark you’ll be pleased to know that Delaney and Colton make a cameo, as does Delaney’s friend Mackenzie (who happens to be Wyatt’s cousin.) It was a lovely surprise and I hope we get more stories within this world, if only so that we can catch more glimpses of them.

Overall, an impeccably written and atmospheric read that horror loving, dark fairytale and Gothic fantasy lovers should definitely consider adding to their TBRs. Though do check the TWs first.

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