This was supposed to be my July read, but I haven’t had the bandwidth or the time to dive into a book. I joined Book of the Month club in July, and Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil was my first pick.
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Although I got my copy through Book of the Month, I’ve included a link to order it through Bookshop.org. I like supporting BookShop, because they support independently owned bookstores. Once I’m set up with the American Booksellers Association, I’ll have a custom link that will allow you to order any book in their store while also supporting my small business.
If you haven’t already read this book, there may be content spoilers ahead. Now, on to the review…
This is a story about hunger. Maria/Sabine is toxic and possessive. This is a story about love. Lottie is really sad and guilty about the way she has to live. This is a story about rage. Alice isn’t happy about it at all and wants revenge.
The story opens in 1521 in Santa Domingo de la Calzada, Spain.
The widow arrives on a Wednesday.
A young flame-haired, inquisitive girl, Maria, watches as a band of pilgrims streams into town. One woman in particular catches her eye — Dressed in all gray, fully veiled, even in the heat. She assumes the woman is a widow, because women simply didn’t travel alone or have any personal freedom. Maria happens upon the widow who is in the woods gathering herbs for tonics, and is immediately mesmerized by her. The widow tells her to go home, and Maria doesn’t see her again until later.
Maria is dissatisfied with her life, and despite not being able to read, is bright and curious about the world around her. She feels trapped in her small life, and stifled by everyone else’s expectations. So, she schemes to get a rich husband. It doesn’t take long. Her appearance is different from the usual Castilian beauty most of the men are accustomed to. Men look at her and Maria knows it. She is successful in finding a wealthy husband, but also finds herself in a gilded prison of her own making. He’s a crusader and, as crusaders are wont to do, leaves her with his family after they’ve been married for a couple of years. One day, at the market with her mother in law, she meets up with the widow again and her fate changes. She becomes Sabine.
We meet Alice in 2019, Boston. A new college student far from home, attempting to start her life over. She doesn’t really feel at home in her own skin or with her new friends. Alice goes to a party, meets a beautiful, mysterious violet haired girl, gets drunk and winds up taking the mysterious girl home with her. When she wakes up the next morning she feels drained, hungover, and disoriented. There is violet hair dye on her sheets along with three drops of blood. A short note is stuck to the lamp beside her bed. She figures out pretty quickly she’s been turned into a vampire, and starts to search for Lottie.
Lottie, the violet haired woman who spent the night with Alice has her own story, but if I go any further I’ll spoil the whole book. All of these women feel constrained by limits and expectations, whether internal or external. For Maria and Lottie, becoming vampires freed them from some of their constraints, but added others. Despite vampirism being one of the important themes in the book and the means of freedom for two of the characters, it doesn’t feel like it’s given the weight it deserves. It is simply a plot device to save them from any real consequences of being who they are. There is some homophobia, but it feels weak and shallow given the historical setting. Maria/Sabine and Lottie both would have faced blatant discrimination and social ostracization, and a very real fear of being institutionalized or murdered for behaving the way they did. Any consequence they might have faced is conveniently washed away by all the blood they spill and excused by virtue of being “widowed.” I know widows had a degree of latitude, but I can’t imagine it being so great that they somehow manage to float through time on that premise. Even widows were not free of suspicion if they were living outside the norms of the time.
I have mixed feelings about this book. I liked it, but didn’t love it, and I wanted to love it. The premise was intriguing, the execution lacking. I wanted to finish the story, but I wasn’t compelled to stay up all night and read it. In fact it took me three weeks to finish, which doesn’t usually happen. The characters seemed very archetypical (A rebellious, red haired, not-like-the-other-girls girl. Groundbreaking.) The slow pacing and repetition didn’t help the story at all. This is not an action packed thriller or a love story. There is love, and a few very mild sex scenes, but it’s not a romance in the commonly accepted sense of the word. Other readers have commented that they were expecting a dark fantasy romance and that’s not what was written at all. It was really bland horror at best, despite the lovely atmospheric writing and the moody backdrop of moldering castles and abandoned family estates.
At over 500 pages, I feel like I should have gotten more meat with the story. I didn’t get emotionally attached to any of the characters, and the story just not very compelling. The sex feels clinical, passionless, and just not sexy at all. Honestly, it should have been closed door or off page with the treatment it received on page. If you enjoy reading about incredibly mild lesbian vampire sex and toxic relationships wrapped in a plot you don’t have to think about very hard, this book might be for you.
I gave this 3-stars on Goodreads, but it’s a solid 2.5 for me. The only thing that saved it was the writing itself.
Content warnings: emotional abuse, sexual assault, suicide, blood, blood drinking, murder.
