Tea (pronounced “tee-uh”) is a young girl who, up until her older brother’s funeral, was largely unremarkable. But, in a moment of grief, she raised her brother from the dead. This marked her a bone witch, a witch who can work with dark magic to not only raise the dead but command daeva, monsters that roam the world wreaking havoc on innocent civilians. Upon demonstrating her abilities, she is located by an established and powerful bone witch named Lady Mykaela who takes her under her wing to be trained to fight against the forces that threaten to take over the world. Why are they hellbent on taking over the world? Unclear. How do these unseen, malevolent forces do this? Unclear. But they’re a threat, I guess.
Chupeco did create an interesting magical system and created a wonderful way for that magical system to fit into the culture of the world. Although bone witches are powerful magic users, they cannot cast elemental runes like other witches. I appreciated this limitation on what would otherwise be too great a power. And though bone witches provide the necessary service of defeating the monsters that crop up from time to time around the world, because of the nature of their power, they are pariahs. This was another limitation that I appreciated that prevents bone witches from leveraging their magical power into social power.
I’ll give it up to Chupeco for her world-building. Beyond the hierarchy and social castes previously mentioned, Chupeco created fully formed cultures and social traditions as well as histories and cities. The world-building is consistent throughout the novel, but I’m not sure that it was all entirely necessary to the story. There are large swaths of descriptions of buildings, ceremonies, and folk tales that I didn’t feel added anything to the story as a whole.
The narrative structure also left something to be desired. That narrative is split between present-day, adult, exiled Tea and young Tea just coming into her powers. In the present day, Tea is recalling her life’s story to a bard while also working on plans of her own. The switching between the two timelines was all very distracting. This structure was most certainly utilized to set up events for future novels in the series. Adult Tea has a mission in the present day that she is setting up in The Bone Witch, but that is not what this book is about, so why should I get invested? There was too much going on without enough pay off.
