The Bone Charmer by Breeana Shields (review)

Abstract

Saskia’s mother, the local Bone Charmer, performs the most important ceremony of life: the “kenning,” in which young hopefuls are “bone-matched” to an auspicious vocation and sometimes to a potential life partner. Saskia, exasperated with her mother’s inscrutability and disregard for her wishes, accidentally breaks her prophetic bone and thereby brings into being two simultaneous versions of her future. In one, she’s “matched” as a tutor and to her sweetheart, Declan. In the other, she sets off for Bone Charmer training alongside her other match, the enigmatic Bram, with whom she shares a fraught, complicated history. Connecting the two life paths is a mystery involving bone theft in Saskia’s village and a too-helpful instructor at Bone Charmer school, and revelations that her mother is in danger set the two on a collision course. While Saskia sometimes seems willfully obtuse about the intentions of those around her, she is quick to accept and act on the facts. Her fears about her own magical abilities prove to be well founded, making her journey to accepting them all the more satisfying. The dual narratives offer a unique take on the love triangle (and neither boy is what he seems), but by far the most interesting relationship, marked by both frustration and tenderness, is between Saskia and her mother. Shields (Poison’s Kiss, BCCB 12/16) offers an engaging meditation on the interplay of fate and free will, and readers can look forward to a sequel that picks up plot threads and further fleshes out the world in which bones are at the center of a multitude of magics both ceremonial and quotidian. FHK