A review by sol_journal
Your Blood, My Bones by Kelly Andrew

medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

**Thank you so much Scholastic Press and Kelly Andrew for the arc! All words and thoughts in this review are my own honest opinion!**
Posted to: NetGalley, Goodreads, and The Storygraph
Posted on: 27 April 2024

3.7 (rounded up to4) out of 5 stars.

Phew, okay this took me much too long to get to and even longer still to finish. I feel like if this book had been with me more consistently, I may have been less critical of it? And I say this lightly because it still got 4 stars based off my rating scale, but I have a lot of thoughts floating around about it.

To start, this isn’t my first Kelly Andrew book. I got a copy of ‘The Whispering Dark’ when it first released (I received it through Illumicrate and my sister through OwlCrate so we buddy read it). It was never finished though, and this was before I knew about DNF’ing, book slumps, reading slumps- all that jazz. So when I saw this title and read the bio, I was a little worried about trying another Kelly Andrew book since I hadn’t finished the first one. I’m really glad I read this though, because while I have my qualms about it, it was a really lovely read!

On a more critical note, the characters sometimes had annoying habits. There were also times where they fell a little flat to me or just lacked a little something that would’ve made their role in the story hit *more*.
Another thing was that I think I got lost a bit in the plot? Some things happened that kind of felt awkwardly placed or solutions just given for the sake of finding an out??
Again, it took me longer to read this book than usual, so I feel like I’ll have different opinions on this when I go back to read it and actually finish it in my usual reading time (a week, give or take. Not a whole month..)

What I *loved* about this book was the writing in some places. It was pretty, it was meaningful, it added a little depth to the flatness I found. I saved a lot of quotes from this because there was just *something* about the rotting, about the decay, and how Andrew describes it. The writing style wasn’t one of my favorites, but the things being written were- does that make sense?

Overall, it was a nice read! I did enjoy it, and I did decide to keep my OwlCrate copy of it. I think the magic used was also interesting to me, but at the heart of it, the struggles and the growth of the main cast had me. 
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