#Titanuary-‘The Bone Garden’ by Heather Kassner

About the book…

A dark, compelling fantasy for readers of ‘The Graveyard Book’ about a mysterious girl seeking the truth about the magic that brought her to life. Made of dust and bone and imagination, Irreelle fears she’s not quite real. Only the finest magical thread tethers her to life-and to Miss Vesper.

But for all her efforts to please her cruel creator, the thread is unravelling. Irreelle is forgetful as she gathers bone dust. She is slow returning from the dark passages beneath the cemetery. Worst of all, she is unmindful of her crooked bones.

When Irreelle makes one final, unforgivable mistake by destroying a frightful creature just brought to life, Miss Vesper threatens to imagine her away once and for all. Defying her creator for the very first time, Irreelle flees to the underside of the graveyard and embarks on an adventure to unearth the mysterious magic that breathes bones to life, even if it means she will return to dust and be no more.

With echoes of Neil Gaiman’s’ The Graveyard Book’ and Jonathan Auxier’s ‘‘The Night Gardener’, debut author Heather Kassner crafts a gorgeously written story humming with magic, mystery, and dark imaginings.

The stunning novel,‘The Bone Garden’ is released into the wild on 23rd July 2019, published in paperback and e=-book by Titan Books!

What an absolutely incredible and deeply creepy novel-I had never really thought about the places where people are interred as a bone garden, and now I cannot stop thinking about what we plant there…as well as what might grow.

This is the perfect escapist novel for a dark, grey and dreary winter-ish night when the sun goes down too early and dark clutters the corner off your house way too soon, leading to yells of someone to turn on the big light, making copious buckets of hot drinks , and wrapping yourself in a warm blanket to waft around your house like a gothic heiress.

I was captured by the cover and stayed for the exquisitely detailed story, this is the tale of Irreelle who is composed of bone dust and tied by the single, most fragile thread to her guardian, Miss Vesper.

Irritating Miss Vesper with her uneven bones and associated clumsiness, she threatens to undo Irreelle and geuinely scared that this kight happen as she is so very fragile, Irreelle runs away.

“Remember, my dear, you do not really and truly exist. You are a figment of my imagination, tethered here by the finest thread.”

But she has never known of life beyond the Bone Garden, or of any other people who are quite like her. And her curiosity is constantly in turmoil over why Miss Vesper makes her collect bone dust, what experiments she needs it for, and why there is an unmarked grave, that the bone dust experiments will apparently help Miss Vesper find.

The concept of identity and only existing as an expression of someone else’s imagination, and then still being a disappointment, is a universal theme for young people who look to their elders, their companions to make sense of their essential biology as well as where their own ideas will take them.

You may come from a place, but do you really have to be from that place?

I would love to see this made into a stop motion film like ‘Coraline’, and, in tone, it also reminds me of anlother novel which talks to young people as they would wish to be talked to about dark topics, ‘The Thief Of Always’,  which I would highly recommend.

It is creepy, mysterious and gorgeously written-what is not to love?

About the author…

Heather Kassner loves thunderstorms, hummingbirds, and books.

She lives with her husband in Arizona, waiting (and waiting and waiting) for the rain, photographing hummingbirds, and reading and writing strange little stories.

Twitter @HeatherKassner

             @TitanBooks

Links-https://www.heatherkassner.com/

https://anewlookonbooks.com/2019/01/02/meet-author-heather-kassner/