My Thoughts:
Contains Spoilers
Your Blood, My Bones is like a fever dream. A lot of it doesn’t make much sense, but it’s impossible to turn away from. It was bold and chaotic and confusing, and I enjoyed every minute of it. Right up until the ending, where I felt betrayed. Robbed. Unhappy. I don’t know how to talk about this book without spoilers, but here goes nothing.
I read a digital copy and listened to the audiobook over the last few months. The digital copy was an eARC from the publisher. When I read the synopsis, I thought it sounded wonderfully creepy. As I started the book, I discovered that it was.
Wyatt has returned to the home she left 5 years ago, in a storm of emotions and heartbreak, leaving behind her best friends in the world: Peter and Jamie. Peter had always been on the family estate, and she never really questioned where he came from or who his parents where. Jamie was the son of the caretaker, and he spent the summers at Willow Heath. They ran around the property, part feral, playing, fighting, growing closer together. Until that night, when in an explosion of violence, Wyatt’s mother had finally had enough. She packed up her daughter and the family cat, and moved in with her sister, hours away from Willow Heath.
Wyatt is back after the death of her father, facing her ghosts before burning the place to the ground. She was betrayed by the people she loved the most. When she never heard from Peter or Jamie, she struggled to understand why. Were their summers together a lie?
What Wyatt finds when she returns is a starving Peter, chained up in the basement, and monsters roaming the grounds. There are seven creepy men lingering on the road just outside the boundary of the estate, cloaked in darkness and sinister with their threats against both Wyatt and Peter. And worst of all, she learns of the terrible legacy of her family, and how they have sacrificed Peter for generations, burning his bones to dust and using it to ward the property against demons from Hell.
What a great setup. I’m not sure how I would feel if I learned my forefathers were butchering a boy time and again to keep the gates of Hell sealed with all of the monsters locked behind them.
Peter is the biggest victim in this story, though Jamie and Wyatt have also suffered at the hands of the adults who should have been looking out for them. Wyatt’s parents kept the dark history of the estate secret from her, and Jamie’s father used his son in his attempts to gain control of the power lurking in the rift that constantly strained to be free of the Westlock wards. Peter’s father was tricked into sending his son to Hell by plunging an axe into his stomach, tricked by a beast into believing he was giving immortality to his heirs. Instead, he opened himself and his son up to gruesome fates.
I love Kelly Andrew’s writing. It is so vivid and lyrical, yet brutal and unrelenting. She wove the present and the past together, creating a tapestry showing how Wyatt, Jamie, and Peter’s lives intertwined, how Wyatt’s world revolved around the two boys, and how her heart had always belonged to Peter.
As Wyatt and Peter try to set right the things that her family released into the world, we are edged ever closer to the ending, and that’s where I had the biggest problem with Your Blood, My Bones There is one explosive moment, where love and grief force yet another sacrifice from the one person who should never have been asked anything from again. I felt deflated after the relationship between Peter and Wyatt was built up and was the core of the story, yet we were all cheated of the ending we wanted. It left a bitter after-taste, one that I have still haven’t recovered from after reading this twice over the course of a summer. Your mileage may definitely vary.
Rating: 3.75 Stars (4.75 until the last 2 chapters)
Source: eArc from Publisher
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