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bebocarrick 's review for:
Daughter of the Bone Forest
by Jasmine Skye
Thank you to NetGalley for providing me an ARC of this audiobook for an honest review. All opinions are my own.
I think some people out there will really enjoy this book, but boy howdy, it was NOT for me. The description sounded really fun. What's not to love about a bone forest, sapphic romance, and magic schools?
Unfortunately, all of this fell so flat for me for a few reasons:
1. The writing style: the writing style felt very clichéd to me. The whole "the wolf in my heart howled" and basically all the talk about the animals in Rosamunde's heart just killed me. The language also felt way too modern for what was supposedly a medieval-ish time period.
2. The heteronormativity of the main ship in a book marketed as queer-normative: YIKES. It truly felt like a slap in the face to my lesbian self to have Shaw so clearly be masculine-coded and take the lead on EVERYTHING and to have Rosamunde be very much the feminine-coded one. For all the other likable queer characters in very queer relationships, the main ship felt like a copy/paste of a stereotypical hetero romance but just with the MMC's pronouns switched. It made me so frustrated!
3. AND FINALLY, THE MOST EGREGIOUS REASON: THE TROPEY-NESS OF IT ALL!! Maybe it's on me for not looking up a tropes list of this book before starting it. But god, this was just a heavy-handed trope cocktail that was so hard to wade through in order to get to some good bits. For those who wish to know, such tropes include:
-fake dating
-fated mates/bonding (also wayyyy feels like this world low-key punishes single people, like bonding is the end all be all? Super irritating as well)
-enemies to lovers
-"I'm not like other girls"
-Hella miscommunication
-school bullying
I honestly probably missed some. One or two of these wouldn't be so bad, but all of them? I truly almost turned off the audiobook in chapter one.
I find the idea of the bone forest very intriguing, and that is the ONLY reason this book is getting 2 stars instead of 1. The audiobook narration was also very nice. I will definitely not be reading the next book because getting through this one was such a pain. But again, I do think there are some folks out there that will eat this UP.
Publish Date: Feb 27, 2024
I think some people out there will really enjoy this book, but boy howdy, it was NOT for me. The description sounded really fun. What's not to love about a bone forest, sapphic romance, and magic schools?
Unfortunately, all of this fell so flat for me for a few reasons:
1. The writing style: the writing style felt very clichéd to me. The whole "the wolf in my heart howled" and basically all the talk about the animals in Rosamunde's heart just killed me. The language also felt way too modern for what was supposedly a medieval-ish time period.
2. The heteronormativity of the main ship in a book marketed as queer-normative: YIKES. It truly felt like a slap in the face to my lesbian self to have Shaw so clearly be masculine-coded and take the lead on EVERYTHING and to have Rosamunde be very much the feminine-coded one. For all the other likable queer characters in very queer relationships, the main ship felt like a copy/paste of a stereotypical hetero romance but just with the MMC's pronouns switched. It made me so frustrated!
3. AND FINALLY, THE MOST EGREGIOUS REASON: THE TROPEY-NESS OF IT ALL!! Maybe it's on me for not looking up a tropes list of this book before starting it. But god, this was just a heavy-handed trope cocktail that was so hard to wade through in order to get to some good bits. For those who wish to know, such tropes include:
-fake dating
-fated mates/bonding (also wayyyy feels like this world low-key punishes single people, like bonding is the end all be all? Super irritating as well)
-enemies to lovers
-"I'm not like other girls"
-Hella miscommunication
-school bullying
I honestly probably missed some. One or two of these wouldn't be so bad, but all of them? I truly almost turned off the audiobook in chapter one.
I find the idea of the bone forest very intriguing, and that is the ONLY reason this book is getting 2 stars instead of 1. The audiobook narration was also very nice. I will definitely not be reading the next book because getting through this one was such a pain. But again, I do think there are some folks out there that will eat this UP.
Publish Date: Feb 27, 2024