A review by effingunicorns
All the Murmuring Bones by A.G. Slatter

4.0

Whoever wrote the summary for this book needs to get off of BookTok, because the expectations I went in with were wildly misinformed. What you might think this book is about, based on the summary, cover, and available digital sample text: a young woman caught between the twin points of family drama and some manner of entanglement with mermaids, probably inherently connected, and all centered around the family's ancestral coastal home. Maybe like What Big Teeth, except with more marriage plots and fewer werewolves. What the book is actually about: the main character dodges all of that stuff early on to go traipsing into the countryside through a series of fairy tales and folklore, gets entangled in a whole other set of family drama, and finally addresses the issues she entered the story on almost as an afterthought.

It's not by any means a bad book--I love fairy tale bullshit, so I would've gone for it either way--but it's very much a different beast from what the available information would indicate, and I think people should be aware of that.
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