Unfortunately, this book has broken my streak of correctly guessing plot twists, and I'm trying not to be mad about it because it was definitely guessable in hindsight.


Mistress of Bones has an extremely interesting concept: the gods gave up their bodies to become land for the mortals, but now that the mortals are stealing the remains of those bodies, the gods want to intervene. The worldbuilding was definitely what drew me to this book; one of my favorite microtropes is gods walking among mortals or being directly involved in their lives. And I did like the worldbuilding in this novel, but sometimes it wasn't executed well (it's never clear exactly what the "Anchors" are in terms of visual imagery), and I think the story would've benefited from a map and/or a dramatis personae. I really needed a dramatis personae given how many characters are involved and how many of them disappear for chapters and are easily forgotten.

Azul's sister is a walking corpse, and Azul is the only thing keeping her alive. When Azul's sister suddenly dies again, Azul is prevented from bringing her back by the Emissary of Death. He proposes a deal: she will help him find the other necromancer causing issues around the world, and in exchange, she will be allowed to raise her sister from the dead once more. As much as I liked the idea for this story, I think there were some issues in the execution. Almost every chapter has a past and a present section, which can make it difficult to keep track of the timelines, especially because the past sections don't occur in chronological order either. I think these sections might've worked better as simple flashbacks, but as it stands, they break up the flow of the plot. The second half of the story was definitely more interesting than the first. It takes about 40% or so to establish the stakes, goals, and direction of the plot. I liked the twists toward the end, and I think this book introduces some interesting premises for a sequel, but the pacing was a bit inconsistent, and I think it took too long to get into the main action of the storyline.

I also struggled to connect to the characters, and looking at other reviews, this seems to be a common issue. Azul is fine as a protagonist - I've read about the necromancer sister trope a handful of times, and it's one of my favorites - but she's very impulsive, and it took almost 80% of the book before I was truly rooting for her. Enjul was very intriguing, but he wasn't in half the chapters, and we only spent a handful of pages in his POV, so his internal motivations are a bit vague at times, and I think he just needed more page time. Nereida was interesting too, but suffered the same issue as Enjul, whereas Count de Anvi was similar to Azul in that he had a lot of page time, but I found him pretty boring and didn't completely understand his relevance to the main plot. There were a lot of other random characters, none of which I paid too much attention to because half of them disappeared after a few chapters, but that proved to be my downfall when I missed the main plot twist.

Mistress of Bones is a YA fantasy featuring minimal romance, an interesting cast of characters, complex and unique worldbuilding, and a mystery plot with hints of court intrigue. I would recommend it to fans of Tara Sim's City of Dusk.
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the free e-ARC!

3.25/5