Honestly this is going to be one of those tough reviews. Root and Bone is one of those books with a lot good about it – but also some flaws, and I’m having trouble synthetizing the goods and bads together, so I’m just going to lay them down and express my person response to the book at the end.
The goods:
The pacing of Root and Bone is fairly cracking, and in a good way. It does go somewhat from whoa to go, with perhaps a few early chapters warming us up, but by about 1/3 and definitely by halfway through, the speed of the story was racing and it sat well for an action packed tale.
In terms of the lore and magic, this was a very hard hitting and at times pulling no punches type approach. It’s the sort of fantasy that I would really enjoy as a teen or young adult as it has a sort of no-holds barred violent approach to urban fantasy, it reminded me a little of early Anita Blake novels.
The MCs (not their husband btw) love interest was actually kinda powerfully written, I’m not usually one to be looking for a romance storyline, but the situation of Root and Bone was intriguing enough (albeit I’ll mention some problematic type stuff later).
Finally even though the setup of the book kind of made it seem like something obvious would happen (e.g. one of the main threads was that Leona has a ‘dark whisperer’ e.g. an evil voice telling her to unleash black magic and just go ballistic on everyone – it seemed like an obvious setup that eventually releasing the power would save the day) however the story did make things more complex than that.
The bads
Hmmm. The first issue that sprung up for me is that the presentation of the story is very 1-dimensional and fairly melodramatic. This isn’t really a book for subtlety and it does have at moment those times (even in an urban fantasy) where people interact in ways that just isn’t very realistic. The first example is the MCs sister Jewel is essentially a bit of a flirt about town and this is shown to us by Jewel doing her thing in the local bar and men are literally hooting and gasping en-mass. There are countless other examples, violent men are violent, sanctimonious older sister is sanctimonious and so on.
On that note, I struggled with the juxtaposition of abuse in this story. Within the first few pages we are quickly introduced to both Leona’s and Jewel’s Husbands being physically abusive. When you combine this complication with the issue in the above paragraph – everything being fairly 1-dimenional – this creates a very strange mood for this book. Leona’s presentation is a capable and powerful witch, in fact we are shown her using magic to control her husband almost as comic relief (he makes him poop himself). It sort of makes sense because abuse can occur to even the most capable and successful of people, however on the other hand the issue of the abuse and the main plot only cross over as they are both happening to her (I suppose you could say the main plot issues and the relationship are thematically linked by evil men but thats about it). This culminated in what were IMO very bizarre choice with Leona’s daughter Peggy. Leona does not treat her daughter well, AT ALL, and its not presented as a comment on the above issues – e.g. its not portrayed as part of relationship abuse OR perhaps as a consequence of what else is going on, Leona is just straight up abusive to her daughter.
As a flip side to the fast pace and heavy action, this story could be considered quite juvenile. Characters say what they think, and do what they say. Bad guys are beyond redemption, Goodies are a bit more complex but lacking narrative threads between their good and bad points.
So my overall response is that I actually enjoyed Root and Bone quite a bit. Despite some major WTF moments I had fun and genuinely read through the book wanting to find out what lay ahead. The flaws mentioned above did sit extremely weirdly for me and I feel like for many readers this book might be a little too much.
Lonely Power Poles 