Bone Gap

Received from the publisher via Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Cover image and summary from Goodreads:

Everyone knows Bone Gap is full of gaps—gaps to trip you up, gaps to slide through so you can disappear forever. So when young, beautiful Roza went missing, the people of Bone Gap weren’t surprised. After all, it wasn’t the first time that someone had slipped away and left Finn and Sean O’Sullivan on their own. Just a few years before, their mother had high-tailed it to Oregon for a brand new guy, a brand new life. That’s just how things go, the people said. Who are you going to blame?

Finn knows that’s not what happened with Roza. He knows she was kidnapped, ripped from the cornfields by a dangerous man whose face he cannot remember. But the searches turned up nothing, and no one believes him anymore. Not even Sean, who has more reason to find Roza than anyone, and every reason to blame Finn for letting her go.

As we follow the stories of Finn, Roza, and the people of Bone Gap—their melancholy pasts, their terrifying presents, their uncertain futures—acclaimed author Laura Ruby weaves a heartbreaking tale of love and loss, magic and mystery, regret and forgiveness—a story about how the face the world sees is never the sum of who we are.

I was looking forward to reading Bone Gap because it sounded like a good mystery, perhaps with some magical realism mixed in. After reading it, I feel like it wasn’t a straight-forward mystery, but it was mysterious. And there was definitely an element of magical realism to the story!

The characters, the story, and the writing were all compelling and the plot definitely intrigued me, but I kept feeling like I was just not understanding some crucial thing as I read. It was as though there was something that I just wasn’t getting, which is a frustrating feeling! After I finished the book, I looked up some information on Demeter and Persephone myths, which might have shed some light on things, but it didn’t occur to me until after I read the author’s acknowledgements at the end of the book to look into that.

Overall, even though I feel like I didn’t always understand what the book was saying, I really liked the way it said it, if that makes sense. Bone Gap was really good: strange and haunting. Recommended.