Laura Ruby
Genre: YA Fantasy, Magical Realism
Hardback: 368 Pages
Publication: March 3, 2015
by Balzer + Bray
Everyone knows Bone Gap is full of gaps—gaps to trip you up, gaps to slide through so you can disappear forever. So when young, beautiful Roza went missing, the people of Bone Gap weren’t surprised. After all, it wasn’t the first time that someone had slipped away and left Finn and Sean O’Sullivan on their own. Just a few years before, their mother had high-tailed it to Oregon for a brand new guy, a brand new life. That’s just how things go, the people said. Who are you going to blame?
Finn knows that’s not what happened with Roza. He knows she was kidnapped, ripped from the cornfields by a dangerous man whose face he cannot remember. But the searches turned up nothing, and no one believes him anymore. Not even Sean, who has more reason to find Roza than anyone, and every reason to blame Finn for letting her go.
As we follow the stories of Finn, Roza, and the people of Bone Gap—their melancholy pasts, their terrifying presents, their uncertain futures—acclaimed author Laura Ruby weaves a heartbreaking tale of love and loss, magic and mystery, regret and forgiveness—a story about how the face the world sees is never the sum of who we are.
Bone Gap is bizarre and magical. Much like Kate Karyus Quinn’s (Don’t You) Forget About Me, I can see readers either completely losing themselves in this novel or wondering what in the world is going on here.
Upon reading the first pages of Bone Gap, I felt as if I had been thrown into a fairy-tale world. There’s Finn, who talks with the crows and the corn. There’s also the way that the story is told—in a language that suggests something magical is sleeping within Bone Gap, and we may stumble upon it around the next page corner.
What didn’t quite work for me is the way the story was told. The story jumps around, between the past and the present and between the alternating perspectives of Finn and Roza, plus a brief look into Sean’s mind and Petey’s mind, which I would have been fine without because they didn’t really contribute to the plot. In fact, I would have been fine if the only perspective we saw was Finn’s. While I appreciate getting to know the characters’ pasts, there was so much going on that I didn’t feel like I really got to know the characters and their world.
I confess. I would have quit Bone Gap in the first quarter of the novel had I not read reviews that gushed about the amazing plot twist at the end. While Bone Gap is a magical place, and I love reading stories about magical places, the plot twist came too late to redeem the novel for me. Furthermore, not much time is spent working with the plot twist. In fact, other than working in a brief fling with Greek mythology, it doesn’t really contribute to my understanding of the world and the characters.
For a more engaging story that also worked with multiple worlds, I would recommend His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman. If you liked (Don’t You) Forget About Me by Kate Karyus Quinn, then you may also like Bone Gap.
A copy was provided by Harper Collins for review
Rating: 3 stars
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Author: Crystal
A story girl at heart, Crystal is a bibliophile who can easily spend the day immersed in a good read. She writes under the name Kristy Wang. You can follow her writing adventures on X and Instagram @_kristywang.
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