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Book Review: The Bone Carver (The Night Weaver, Book 2) by Monique Snyman

cover art for The Bone Carver by Monique Snyman

The Bone Carver (The Night Weaver, Book 2) by Monique Snyman

Vesuvian Press, 2020

ISBN-13 : 978-1645480082

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition Bookshop.org   | Amazon.com )

 

The Bone Carver is the sequel to The Night Weaver, a previous Stoker nominee in the YA category. These two factors mean it has a high bar to jump, as the second book in a series usually isn’t able to stand alone.

In The Night Weaver, seventeen-year old Rachel Cleary lives in the isolated New England community of Shadow Grove. She discovers her neighbor across the street, Mrs. Crenshaw, is a guardian protecting the boundary between our world and the fae realm in Shadow Grove. While out with Rachel, Mrs. Crenshaw’s visiting grandson, Dougal, recognizes the Black Annis, a fae creature who feeds on children. With the help of her former boyfriend, Greg, and Dougal, Rachel realizes there is a pattern of children’s disappearances over time that has been covered up by the town council and the sheriff. Complicating this mess is the involvement of a Orion, a drug-dealing fairy prince who has a strange connection with Rachel. She defeats the Night Weaver and saves the children.

The Bone Carver continues Rachel’s story. Reasonably wanting to escape Shadow Grove and go to college, Rachel has studied hard, but unfortunately she has a panic attack during her SATs.  Dougal is now enrolled in school with her, Greg is attempting to make her jealous, Orion has returned to the fae realm, and a creepy new boy, Cam, is following her around. Entering an abandoned part of her high school, she discovers popular girl Mercia, who has epilepsy, having a seizure, and helps her recover. After the seizure is over, Rachel finds a bone carving of Mercia having a seizure.  Later that day, after Mrs. Crenshaw falls and breaks her hip,  Rachel finds another bone carving. Rachel is convinced a “miser fae” called the Bone Carver is causing the accidents. As more people find disturbing bone carvings of themselves, Rachel and Dougal investigate, and find gory evidence of powerful fae magic. They determine that Rachel needs to enter the fae realm to find Orion.

Mercia reveals that she is a witch able to open a dimensional portal to the fae realm, and Rachel goes through, wanders aimlessly, causes a disaster, is kidnapped by Orion’s older brother Nova, the king of the fairies, and finally leaves with Orion to (hopefully) save the day. During her five days in fairyland, things have gotten exponentially worse, with people, including her mother, ending up in the hospital or acting violent or irrational, and the high school in a shambles. Despite her recent desire to flee Shadow Grove, Rachel decides she is willing to die to take the Bone Carver down and save the town.

The Bone Carver is suitably chilling and gruesome and doesn’t stint on body horror. Snyman has a talent for vivid description, as evidenced by Rachel’s visions of the vicious deaths the Bone Carver has inflicted on the girls he’s murdered. The plot around Jenny, Rachel’s mother, was extremely disturbing. There’s a heavy #MeToo, anti-incel message to the book as well, and the scenes between Rachel and Greg, Rachel and Cam, and Rachel and the Bone Carver thoroughly creeped me out.

However, what most impressed me, was the author’s depiction of Mercia. She is a well-developed character: competent, smart, caring, attractive, and popular, and when Greg gets irrational and handsy with Rachel, Mercia has no problem knocking him out. It’s easy to write a character who is living with epilepsy as an invalid or pitiful and in need of rescue, but Mercia is never written that way or treated like one by other characters. Although she comes from a family of witches (and it irritated me that her epilepsy was magically caused) she isn’t effortlessly “magical”, and she isn’t suddenly “cured” at the end of the story. In fact, her seizures aren’t quite under control, and she needs medication to help. As someone living with epilepsy I can tell you that this is a character type I have NEVER seen in any book depicting someone living with epilepsy in any age group or genre, and it was absolutely a pleasure to read this.

Unfortunately, Mercia is one of the few characters that actually did have character development and purpose in the book. Dougal and Mrs. Crenshaw are out of the picture for a majority of the book, Greg is essentially a plot device, and after all the to-do about going to the fae realm and bringing back Orion, I question whether he was useful enough to justify Rachel’s disappearing for five days while everything fell to pieces. There’s a huge reveal at the end of the book, so I assume he’ll be more involved in book three. While a nice addition to the series, though, The Bone Carver really cannot stand alone as a novel, and doesn’t hold together as well as the first book. For its depiction of a character living with epilepsy, however, I highly recommend it.

 

Contains: body horror, gore, violence, sexual assault, mentions of self-harm and suicide.

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

 

Editor’s note: The Bone Carver (Shadow Grove, Vol. #2) is a nominee on the final ballot for the Bram Stoker Award in the category of Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel.

 

Book Links: Stoker Awards 2018 Final Ballot for Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel

In our continuing effort to review as many of the books on the final ballot for the Stoker Award, Monster Librarian has hit another landmark we have now reviewed all five of the novels on the final ballot for the 2018 Stoker Award in the category of Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel. Want to know what we think? Here are links to the reviews. There are many fine books that did not make the final ballot, but of those that did, I think the standout is clear.

The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein by Kiersten White

Sawkill Girls by Claire Legrand

Broken Lands by Jonathan Maberry

The Night Weaver by Monique Snyman

Dread Nation by Justina Ireland

 

Book Review: The Night Weaver (Shadow Grove, Vol. 1) by Monique Snyman

The Night Weaver (Shadow Grove, Vol. 1) by Monique Snyman

Gigi Publishing, 2018

ISBN-13: 978-1643163031

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

 

Seventeen-year-old Rachel Cleary lives in the isolated community of Shadow Grove (it’s unclear how isolated, or how large, it actually is, as it has suburbs, a trendy downtown, three grocery stores, multiple chain stores, and a rundown nine-story apartment building, but also wooded areas and farms)  next to a mysterious wood that people know better than to explore. Disappearances and strange deaths, especially of children, go without investigation by the sheriff’s department and are apparently unnoticed by the town’s population… except for the local high schoolers, who have organized to protect younger children and impose a curfew, and Rachel’s eccentric neighbor, Mrs. Crenshaw.

Mrs. Crenshaw’s delinquent nephew, a good-looking Scot with an impenetrable accent, happens to be in town. While he and Rachel are driving home from a party, they are attacked by a creature he recognizes from Scottish folklore, a Black Annis (also known as the Night Weaver), which steals and eats children. Although Mrs. Crenshaw tells Rachel the town council has conspired to eliminate all records of past incidents, it turns out that Rachel’s deceased father, a historian who didn’t believe in computers, has boxes of handwritten journals on the history and legends of Shadow Grove that are stored in her attic. They discover a pattern: the disappearances have happened before.

Then Rachel notices that her mother, and a number of other women in town, are behaving oddly: they have all emptied their closets and dressed in gray. She decides to consult her estranged friend Greg, whose family has strong roots in the town, and see if together they can find additional information about the Night Weaver and, possibly, what both of them have been calling the “moms’ club.” Greg realizes the factor all the women have in common is that they participated in the same grief support group, and after Rachel witnesses what appears to be a nighttime visitation to her mother of her father, they discover together that the Night Weaver feeds on grief and despair. Rachel and Greg realize that the Night Weaver is manipulating the members of the “moms’ club” into taking and delivering children to it, in order to have visitations from their deceased loved ones. And then a drug-dealing fairy prince named Orion gets involved, and things start to get REALLY convoluted.

Before I ever started this book, I knew the author, Monique Snyman, was from South Africa, and I was curious to see what she would come up with. Interestingly, she chose to set her book in the United States (I’m guessing Michigan, although she never actually says where it is located). Her premise is original– I hadn’t heard of the Black Annis, and the idea of a creature that plays on the feelings of members of a grief support group is interesting to me (although on a personal level, I have difficulty suspending my disbelief that grieving parents would intentionally cause the same kind of grief to others) I also liked that the high school students were portrayed as independent and resourceful (for the most part). There is also some very impressive full-color artwork representing the Black Annis in different places in the book, which definitely added to the creepiness factor.

However, I also found some real issues with the book. The first noticeable issue was that the book is written in present tense, which is jarring at times, especially at the beginning. The second is Dougal’s nearly impenetrable Scottish accent. I understand this is supposed to reinforce his background, but it really disrupted the flow of the story for me to have to translate in my head before I could move the story forward.

Outside of these two issues, the setting is problematic. Snyman refers to Shadow Grove as an isolated small town– to me, that evokes a setting like Twin Peaks. And the story itself seems intimate. The town has a single law enforcement official (a sheriff) and a relatively small group of people are involved in the actual story– my mental picture was maybe a few thousand at most. But what she is describing is more like a small city, which can’t be terribly isolated if it has multiple grocery and chain stores and most certainly would have federal agents on the ground with so many missing children.

Snyman also seemed to leave her various male supporting characters at loose ends. I like that Rachel is the leading character, and that the supporting male characters aren’t all necessarily love interests, but when Rachel moved on from working with Dougal (whose bad-boy persona dropped pretty quickly) to Greg (who she had a history with) they just kind of stopped whatever it was they were doing until the next time they were needed for a plot point. It’s still sort of unclear to me why Snyman had Greg lead Rachel to Orion and then leave her alone with him.

There were also a few comments and incidents that rubbed me the wrong way. Early in the book, Dougal makes a reference to spoiled American girls and Rachel says. “Well, that’s mildly racist.” I’m surprised an editor didn’t catch that, as “American” is not a race.  Shortly after meeting Rachel, Orion, the drug-dealing fairy prince, pins her up against a wall, against her will, drugs her, and takes her cell phone.  Afterwards, he claims it’s because he needs to do this in order to share essential memories, but starting these two out with a nonconsensual assault made it hard to believe they could be equal partners in defeating the Black Annis.

Despite these problems, I found Rachel’s relationships with Dougal, Greg, and Mrs. Crenshaw interesting enough to want to learn more about these characters. As this is the first book in a series, I expect that Shadow Grove and its denizens will be fleshed out and smoothed over more successfully in future volumes, and it will be interesting to see where Snyman goes with it.

Editor’s note: The Night Weaver is on the final ballot for the 2018 Bram Stoker Award in the category of Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel.