Not Even Bones  by Rebecca Schaeffer

HMH Books for Young Readers, 2018

ISBN-13: 978-1328863546

Available: Hardcover, paperback, and Kindle edition

If you are planning to start this book, make sure you have plenty of time to finish it, because if you put it down, unless you have a very strong stomach, you may find it difficult to pick it up again. I have addressed content issues within this review, but please see the content warning underneath, as it includes items suggested by the author. 

Not Even Bones is a YA novel set in Peru that takes place in a world teeming with “unnatural creatures.” Some of these, like vampires, are dangerous. Others simply have unusual abilities. While there is an organization, INHUP, tasked with protecting harmless unnaturals, it isn’t effective at policing the black market in unnaturals’ body parts. Nita’s mother hunts and kills unnaturals, and brings them to Nita for dissection and packaging. Nita loves dissection, so she tries not to think about who the dead bodies might have been when they were alive, but one day her mother brings home a living unnatural whose parts will sell better if they’re fresh, and Nita can’t deal with cutting pieces of a living person, so she sets him free. Shortly after, Nita, who has an unnatural ability to heal herself, is kidnapped for sale on the black market herself  and imprisoned in an isolated market on the Amazon in the midst of the jungle. Believing her mother has sold her, Nita decides she must rely on her own resourcefulness to escape, something she becomes even more certain of when she realizes her kidnapper employs a zannie, an unnatural who feeds off the pain of others and is willing to torture them to get his meal. Even a zannie has his limits, though, and Nita and the zannie, Kovit, team up to escape from the market.

Schaeffer does not pull her punches in this book. There is no question that the main (and most of the secondary) characters have done terrible things, unapologetically, and Schaeffer has Kovit explicitly make this point:

“I like it better when people remember who I am. The only thing I hate more than being demonized is when people actively ignore what I do or try to make excuses for it… When they try to make me sympathetic, moralize all the decisions that aren’t moral.”

Nita and Kovit are desperate people, and in the course of the story Nita crosses moral lines she didn’t even know she had, to the point that Kovit warns her that the only thing keeping them from becoming true monsters is setting limits, however arbitary, and sticking to them no matter what.  The gore, gruesomeness, torture, and especially cannibalism was difficult for me to handle (although much is only implied, what we do see is more than enough, and cannibalism of any kind is usually a deal-breaker for me). I can’t recommend it generally to teens, unless they have a very strong stomach and a sophisticated understanding of morality, because in spite of their monstrous actions, their often selfish motivations, and this explicit reminder that they are not sympathetic characters, Schaeffer still managed to have me rooting for Nita and Kovit. They are victimizers, but they’re also victims of both biology and circumstance.

Schaeffer’s imagination is incredible, her world-building is fantastic, and the characters she takes time to develop fully are many-faceted and complex. I can’t think of too many horror novels set in South America, but it was a great choice for this book. Another unusual choice, especially because the book is set in South America, is that Kovit is Thai, and while it isn’t actually necessary to go into this detail to move the story along, this background does come up in an explanation of his origin as an unnatural specific to Thailand, how colonialism has affected the perception of “zannies”, his family, and how he ended up in this particular situation. I haven’t seen many Thai characters in YA fiction, so this was kind of neat to see.

This is both a physically and emotionally gut-wrenching book, both hard to put down and hard to pick back up, but the cliffhanger ending and memorable characters ensure that, despite the difficulty I had with the body horror (especially the dissections and the cannibalism) in this book, I will be looking out for the sequel, Only Ashes Remain, out soon.

Contains: Gore, violence, sadism, death, mutilation, dissections, body horror, cannibalism, torture, dismemberment, mention of suicide, mention of animal abuse.