Early Review – The Bone Orchard by Sara A. Mueller (4.5/5 stars)
Reading Level: Adult
Genre: Dark Fantasy
Length: 336 pages
Publisher: Tor Books
Release Date: March 22, 2022
ASIN: B0927CQ1BV
Stand Alone or Series: 1st book in the Dark Gods series
Source: eGalley from NetGalley
Rating: 4.5/5 stars
“Charm is a witch, and she is alone. The last of a line of conquered necromantic workers, now confined within the yard of regrown bone trees at Orchard House, and the secrets of their marrow.
Charm is a prisoner, and a survivor. Charm tends the trees and their clattering fruit for the sake of her children, painstakingly grown and regrown with its fruit: Shame, Justice, Desire, Pride, and Pain.
Charm is a whore, and a madam. The wealthy and powerful of Borenguard come to her house to buy time with the girls who aren’t real.
Except on Tuesdays, which is when the Emperor himself lays claim to his mistress, Charm herself.
But now—Charm is also the only person who can keep an empire together, as the Emperor summons her to his deathbed, and charges her with choosing which of his awful, faithless sons will carry on the empire—by discovering which one is responsible for his own murder.
If she does this last thing, she will finally have what has been denied her since the fall of Inshil—her freedom. But she will also be betraying the ghosts past and present that live on within her heart.
Charm must choose. Her dead Emperor’s will or the whispers of her own ghosts. Justice for the empire or her own revenge.”
Series Info/Source: This is a stand alone book. I got an eGalley of this from Netgalley to review.
Thoughts: This was a 5 star read for me up to the last third of the book. I love the creative world here and how Charm and her sisters survive. The idea of the bone garden and the way psychics are dealt with in society was fascinating.
However, as things progressed this became a very clear “who-dun-it” type of mystery with a lot of twists and turns that were a fairly predictable. The story just went on for a bit too long and lost some of it’s wonder and sparkle towards the end.
I also felt like things were very rushed at the end; if this is the first book in a series great…if this is a stand alone (like I believe it is) then it feels very unfinished. I feel like pacing could have been better, less of Charm and the Lady running around in the middle and more wrap-up of how things played out.
My Summary (4.5/5): Overall this is a well done and creative fantasy that I mostly enjoyed. I will be honest, I started skimming a bit towards the end here…it just got too long for me. However, as I got right to the end I was really interested to see how things wrapped up and then everything felt so rushed and incomplete. Still parts of this were very creative and it was definitely worth the read and I am eager to see what stories Mueller comes up with in the future.
