A review by erickabdz
The Bone Witch by Rin Chupeco

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

2.0

"When people cut us, we are expected to do only two things: smile and bleed."


I'm so utterly devasted. I have been following Rin Chupeco in social media for a while, only because she is a very cool person, and I was excited about the prospect of reading something of her finally. Lots of people I follow have also loved The Bone Witch and gave it high ratings, so I guess I had a little too many expectations for it. I'm so very sad I couldn't love it as much as I had anticipated I would.

Firstly, I wasn't expecting this many parallels with Japanese geiko. At first, I didn't know the asha were inspired in them, but it became evident as the lecture advanced. Inspired, though, feels like an inadequate word when literally everything in the asha has its counterpart in the geisha, from the dances to the accounting to okiya and ochaya. All of Tea's life as an asha felt straight out of [b:Memoirs of a Geisha|929|Memoirs of a Geisha|Arthur Golden|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1409595968l/929._SY75_.jpg|1558965] or, being more culturally accurate, [b:Geisha, a Life|522534|Geisha, a Life|Mineko Iwasaki|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1359402937l/522534._SY75_.jpg|18133]. The kingdom being called Kion even sounds like the geiko district Gion.

The only significant differences were the martial arts the geisha were part of and, of course, the dark asha. While I liked both of these aspects, they felt irreconcilable for me with the other parts of the asha culture; it is not that they couldn't be, but that I was not given just enough reasons to believe they should. There was nothing that tried to blend these two concepts: mastering arts and fighting monsters and work as bodyguards. I could have totally understood that men were expected to go and fight while women had to use their powers to entertain, but the reason why women were expected to do both without negative connotations in any is beyond me.

Dark ashas were a very cool concept, though, and part of the reason I didn't dislike this book. I've heard that they are based on Filipino mangkukulam, and I did enjoy to read about them doing their witch thingies.

I think the reason I couldn't bring myself to like this book was mostly Tea. Try as I might, I couldn't like her. Everybody and everything in the narrative was trying to sell me this idea that she was oh so powerful and poor girl only bad things happen that I just couldn't stand it. Dark asha can command the death, the living, destroy monsters... and Tea is the only current dark asha and also most powerful that most of them and I'm sorry but it's just... too OP for me.

I actually didn't especially like any character in the book... there were so many pages with descriptions of clothes and architecture but I couldn't get attached to any of the characters. And the apparent love triangle- I'm just-

Anyhow, I think I'm going to read the next books. Everybody says they're better than this one, and I'm a little bit interested in what is going to happen (mostly because the framing device keeps insisting that some interesting is going to happen and it never happens and I'm tired of the teasing but it also worked
Spoilerand I please want to know that all of what Tea is doing is for selfish reasons and she's actually darkened please
).
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