Name: Bone Crier's Dawn (Bone Grace series #2)
Author: Kathryn Purdie
Publisher: Katherine Tegan Books
Date published: March 2021
Genre: Fiction, young adult, fantasy, romance
Pages: 437
Rating: 4/5
Bone Criers have been ferrying the dead into the afterlife for centuries, a dangerous duty only possible with the powers they gain from sacrificing their amourés, the men destined to love them and die. But Bone Criers Ailesse and Sabine - along with Ailesse’s love, Bastien - are working to chart their own course and rewrite the rules of the afterlife. If they don’t break the soul bond between Ailesse and her amouré, she could die - just as Bastien’s father did.
Sabine struggles to maintain her authority as matrone of her famille - the role always destined for her sister - even as she fights to control the violent jackal power within her.
Bastien is faced with a new dilemma as the spirits of the Underworld threaten the souls of his friends - and his father.
Ailesse attempts to resist her mother’s siren song as she’s drawn into her own version of the Underworld. How will she save her friends once she’s cut off from their world?
I enjoyed reading this sequel and conclusion to Bone Crier's Moon and sped through it quite quickly. However, I think I was expecting something slightly different from the plot, as it felt like the first part of the book did not move on much from where the ending of the first book left off and the characters were almost stuck going in circles with their conversations and emotions.
I also felt that too much time was spent on certain relationship conflicts when if those had been cut down, simplified or executed in a different way then there could have been more time to develop other relationships and plot points to make them more satisfying. I would have especially liked to see more time for Ailesse and Sabine to connect and talk about what they had been going through and to work together.
Unfortunately while I still really liked the main characters and rooted for them as I did in the first book, they were not always written as strongly as I felt they were in the first one and felt weaker in some ways. The characters often made foolish decisions that were frustrating to read, and while I could understand emotions clouding judgement to some extent, some of the choicess they made were so clearly going to lead to bad circumstances that it did not seem believable that the characters would make them, no matter what their emotions were. The characters kept holding each other back, fighting over things that seemed very small in comparison to the larger problems, miscommunicating and being insensitive to each other's pain, and a lot of the time never seemed to even try looking at things from each other's perspective or from the bigger picture. A lot of these things were used to create conflict in the story, but mostly they seemed unnecessary or just too frustrating, which kept the story from being fun to read at parts.
On a more positive note, the writing style was very easy to read and the descriptions all made the story and world clear to imagine and picture in my mind. The mythology and legends of the world were also fascinating to read about and now that I had the understanding from reading the first book, learning more about how the Bone Crier's work and seeing all the revelations about their magic was really interesting.
Overall, even with the flaws in the story, the ending was satisfying enough and I was relieved when the characters found their happy endings and was pleased with where they ended up. I just think it would have felt even better if the journey to reach those endings had achieved its potential and taken a few different routes. It was absolutely still an engrossing and thrilling book with a lot of great ideas, but there could have been a bit more work done to make both books a really solid and cohesive duology.
Despite the parts that I did not like, I think I will read this again someday. I think I will enjoy it more on a second read, as I did with the first one, and perhaps I will change my mind about the weaknesses when I read it knowing that things are going to resolve in a way that I like.
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