Oh, She's Bookish: Bone of My Bone

Completed: June 8th, 2026

Oh, She’s Bookish: Bone of My Bone

Okay, so I read My Darling Dreadful Thing and it hit so hard, with so many flaws, that I immediately jumped into the author’s newest title. Which, as an aside, was just so exciting to know and author await their newest book, even if it was only a few weeks of waiting. It brought me back to summer days of waiting for a Barnes & Noble trip with my mom to get the newest Pendragon novel and tearing through it mere days later to my mother’s chagrin. This is how I ended up reading the Twilight series in the first place. My mother went into the store, asked for the longest age-appropriate book on the shelf and bam, not I’m a furry. And into blood stuff. Coincidently, that’s going to come quite in handy for this book!

Bone of My Bone is set in the 30-years-war, which took place primarily in Central Europe - this book is set mostly in Bavaria as far as I can tell. Though border lines and modern countries hadn’t quite sorted that all out. It was bloody. People were dying left and right, the Church was king - hence the killing, those Protestants and Catholics, amiright?? - and this story puts together a young, Protestant peasant and a Catholic nun. And puts them on the run, dodging soldiers and trying to get back to some semblance of home.

Overall, this book is quite slow and shallow for most of the book. It has a linear, almost video game quest-like structure that feels like a world, but with not enough detail as to what is going on in it. Setups for the paranormal or gothic horror trope-y moments feels painfully obvious at every turn and you never particularly thrown off by the plot twist attempts. It’s an odd read and I think the author’s vision far outpaced her abilities, or at least time spent trying to realize this world and story.

Having said that, the ending broke my heart.

Interspersed with the dull and shallow I mentioned above are intimate, well-researched tensions between the two main characters. The seed of their distrust and eventual desire for each other so deeply rooted in their religious difference. About how love compromises all. In the last 30 or 40 pages everything in the text hit like a truck and I found myself saying out loud, “No, you can’t do this to them. No, not like this.” Dejected, but ultimately moved.

Johanna van Veen writes excellent interpersonal dialogue. She understands that so much sapphic desire comes from the mundane and that gothic horror plays with that intimacy through social and sexual transgression. I think it’s because of these moments, that are honestly too few, that the ending hits so hard. I can’t recall the last time a book had a lukewarm beginning and middle and somehow pulls off a noteworthy ending!

Overall, I really cared about the characters, liked the mythical/folklore elements - specifically the Bavaria-specific ghouls -, and the world that this is set in. I just don’t think the vision came to fruition. Each puzzle piece has its space in the novel, but they are not connected in a meaningful way. I think what makes My Darling Dreadful Thing outstanding isn’t that it is perfectly written, but that it’s weird. It’s transgressive. It tries to make you uncomfortable. The scene of Roosja and Agnes first kissing is at a seance under false pretenses. There was never a moment like that in this book and it hurts because of it.