NetGalley Review: Bonesmith by Nicki Pau Preto

Hey all, Sam here.

Welcome back to another Sunday, and another NetGalley book review. I feel like I’m churning out book reviews at a decent pace, but it also feels like I’m not getting enough done…and I know that’s my own mind sort of self-sabotaging me, making me feel less accomplished than I am, but that’s just how it is sometimes.

The fact is that today’s post makes us on a 173 day blog streak (and this is the 197th blog post we’ve shared in 2023). Honestly, that is pretty great. If the words that we’ve compiled and written this year were for novels instead of blog posts, we could have finished two epic fantasy tomes by now. That’s kind of impressive.

Anyway, I am super excited to talk about today’s book….and so instead of continuing to ramble here in the intro, I’m just going to dive straight into the review.

There’s not much longer to wait for this one, because it will be released July 25th in the US.

Gideon the Ninth meets the Game of Thrones White Walkers in this dark young adult fantasy about a disgraced ghost-fighting warrior who must journey into a haunted wasteland to rescue a kidnapped prince.

Ready your blade. Defeat the undead.

In the Dominions, the dead linger, violent and unpredictable, unless a bonesmith severs the ghost from its earthly remains. For bonesmith Wren, becoming a valkyr—a ghost-fighting warrior—is a chance to solidify her place in the noble House of Bone and impress her frequently absent father. But when sabotage causes Wren to fail her qualifying trial, she is banished to the Border Wall, the last line of defense against a wasteland called the Breach where the vicious dead roam unchecked.

Determined to reclaim her family’s respect, Wren gets her chance when a House of Gold prince is kidnapped and taken beyond the Wall. To prove she has what it takes to be a valkyr, Wren vows to cross the Breach and rescue the prince. But to do so, she’s forced into an uneasy alliance with one of the kidnappers—a fierce ironsmith called Julian from the exiled House of Iron, the very people who caused the Breach in the first place…and the House of Bone’s sworn enemy.

As they travel, Wren and Julian spend as much time fighting each other as they do the undead, but when they discover there’s more behind the kidnapping than either of them knew, they’ll need to work together to combat the real a dark alliance that is brewing between the living and the undead.

My Thoughts

Rating: 5 stars

I absolutely cannot wait to have a completed version of this book on my shelves….and this book is definitely making me want to go back and finish the author’s previous trilogy, because I read and loved the first one, then bought book two and book three when they released but then never actually got around to reading them. At this point, I would need to re-read book one, but honestly that might be worth it.

I was captivated from the very beginning. And okay, fine, perhaps some of my interest is because there were a few characterization moments and details for Wren and her fellow bonesmiths that made me think of one of my favorite D&D characters. But I don’t know, I just was very fascinated by the magic and the sort of natural spookiness that comes from dealing with the undead in a story.

Okay, I can think of one sort of minor complaint for this book, but I’m not actually going to reduce the rating for it, and that is the fact that for the most part we follow Wren and Julian in this story, but then there was a moment like 40% in where the perspective shifted to Leo, the kidnapped prince, and through the whole book we only get a few chapters focused mostly on him. After so much third person limited POV focused on Wren or Julian, it just felt like this sudden unexpected shift. Although, it wasn’t unwelcome, because it was nice to find out what was going on with Leo, and he was a fun character.

And okay, sure, there were some revelations that I figured out quite a ways before they actually were revealed to the characters…but that happens quite frequently to me when it comes to stories, so I’m not going to punish a book for that so long as the journey to the revelation is entertaining and interesting.

I was definitely interested in the world and the characters and the magic, and in piecing things together. It helped me fly through the book even more than I would have normally.

Now that it’s over I’m left feeling sad that I read this one early…because now I have even longer to wait for the sequel.

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All right, well that’s all from me for today. Thank you so much for stopping by, and I’ll be back soon with more geeky content.