Review – Kingdom of Needle and Bone by Seanan McGuire (4/5 stars)
Reading Level: Adult
Genre: Science Fiction
Length: 128 pages
Publisher: Subterranean Press
Release Date: December 23, 2018
ASIN : B07L78QRMY
Stand Alone or Series: Stand Alone
Source: Bought for Kindle
Rating: 4/5 stars
“We live in an age of wonders.
Modern medicine has conquered or contained many of the diseases that used to carry children away before their time, reducing mortality and improving health. Vaccination and treatment are widely available, not held in reserve for the chosen few. There are still monsters left to fight, but the old ones, the simple ones, trouble us no more.
Or so we thought. For with the reduction in danger comes the erosion of memory, as pandemics fade from memory into story into fairy tale. Those old diseases can’t have been so bad, people say, or we wouldn’t be here to talk about them. They don’t matter. They’re never coming back.
How wrong we could be.
It begins with a fever. By the time the spots appear, it’s too late: Morris’s disease is loose on the world, and the bodies of the dead begin to pile high in the streets. When its terrible side consequences for the survivors become clear, something must be done, or the dying will never stop. For Dr. Isabella Gauley, whose niece was the first confirmed victim, the route forward is neither clear nor strictly ethical, but it may be the only way to save a world already in crisis. It may be the only way to atone for her part in everything that’s happened.
She will never be forgiven, not by herself, and not by anyone else. But she can, perhaps, do the right thing.
We live in an age of monsters.”
Series Info/Source: This is a stand alone book that I bought for Kindle.
Story (4/5): The story is mainly about Dr. Isabella Gauley and her action to form a community secluded from the rest of the world in the midst of a pandemic that annihilates people’s immune systems. This was well written and eerie to read given that it was written before the COVID pandemic. Some things in here are strangely similar to what we are going through now. However, given what we have been going through there were some things in the book that were also strangely overlooked …however…hindsight is 20/20 and all that (pun intended). I think my biggest complaint is the end of the book, I saw the huge twist coming and thought it was fairly predictable. My issue with this twist (aside from the predictability) is that I don’t think our main protagonist’s motivations were well explained and they just didn’t quite make sense.
Characters (4/5): Dr. Isabella is a character that is interesting and complex. She is the primary character in the book; although we do get to spend a bit of time with Patent Zero’s mother as well. You can tell Isabella isn’t afraid to venture into grey areas right from the beginning, while I never really engaged with her character she was interesting enough and had some intriguing complexity to her.
Setting (4/5): This book is set in the near future. A lot of the book takes place in Dr. Gauley’s clinic and in the sanctuary she sets up. It’s a world that is eerily similar to our own in this COVID-19 pandemic (there is a mention of distance learning for kids, etc). Although I couldn’t help thinking “why aren’t people social distancing!!!” and “where are their masks!!” throughout. While it is not an incredibly novel setting it is an intriguing imagination of what things could be like if this happened, and the situations are different enough from our current pandemic to be intriguing.
Writing Style (4/5): This book is well written and easy to read. I whipped through it quickly and never got bored. I do think it was a bit predictable and thought there were some major holes in how this pandemic was dealt with. However, that may be my current more pandemic-saavy self speaking rather than my past more pandemic-innocent self.
My Summary (4/5): Overall I enjoyed this and am kind of glad I read it, I think I would have enjoyed it more if I hadn’t read it in the middle of a pandemic. The twist at the end was a bit out of left field and despite that still kind of predictable. If you are looking for a fun, short, pandemic thriller with a twist at the end I would recommend. If you’ve had enough of pandemics to last a lifetime I might skip this.
