Review: Mistress of Bones
Mistress of Bones by Maria Z. Medina
My rating: 3.5/5
Synopsis:
It’s been thousands of years since the gods lifted the continents into the air so humanity could thrive, chaining the lands down with their bones and turning them into Anchor.
Azul del Arroyo doesn’t care about gods or Anchor; she cares about being responsible for her sister’s death and getting her bones from the capital so she can bring her back to life. Again. But in her way stands the Emissary of the Lord Death, who will do anything in his power to stop her, because a necromancer like her shouldn’t exist—no matter how alluring.
As Azul and the Emissary’s cat-and-mouse game leads them to the dangerous Court of Cienpuentes, their fate becomes entwined with a count who begrudgingly works for a child king, a faceless witch who transforms Anchor into dreams she can peddle, and a long-lost half-brother with a secret of his own. It’s a time of enlightenment, of rapiers and scientific prowess, in a country where Anchor ceased to be something worth revering a long time ago, and people have forgotten the gods’ sacrifice.
But the gods haven’t. Because the gods want their bones back, and they’re not opposed to becoming players in their own game.
Review:
[I received a copy of this book through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.]
Another NetGalley review that is long overdue, but better later than never!
The world depicted in this novel is quite interesting: a rotting civilisation on the verge of falling into the void after depleting said world of a precious resource that is actually its very bones—and some of the gods, namely the god of Death, aren’t very happy with that, and their emissaries will try to ensure people stop breaking the world. The concepts linked to this (bones used as magic), as well as the Spanish Renaissance atmosphere, full of intrigue, masks and swashbuckling, bathing the story, definitely grabbed my attention, and once I got how it all worked, I was excited.
A note about necromancy in general: I tremendously enjoys necromancy. It can be very gruesome, sure, and in itself, riding on death, it comes across as a very negative kind of magic… but this is precisely why I enjoy it all the more: because it opens the door to so many opportunities to try and see whether it can be something else than “just death and animating skeletons”! And in this book, I could see this. Azul didn’t start on that way for power, because she worshipped death, because: she started out of love, her love for a much-admired elder sister, little girl far from home that she was at the time. And I will respect that.
There is also a bit of romance, but… maybe I should call it attraction, or perhaps romance-bait more than anything else? There’s something strange and fascinating to this dance between an emissary of Death who, against all expectations, does not dabble in necromancy and even finds it anathema, while the necromancer is actually full of life and willpower, simply wanting to get back the person she loves most in the world. I’m not really sure if I enjoyed it or found it bizarre? It’s not your typical romance, which can be a good change, or not such a good thing, depending on preferences. No spoilers about how it goes.
Where I enjoyed the novel less was in its execution. I have no problems in general with multiple POVs and switching between two timelines, but this still needs to be executed well in order to work, and here, it was just a tad bit… messy? Not impossible to follow, but demanding more effort from me than similar narratives normally do. I had trouble to focus at times, which in itself detracted from the world building.
Conclusion: 3.5*. While this was not a 4* or 5*, overall I still enjoyed it, and would be interested in picking the next instalment as well (I think it’s meant to be a duology)?