 Hello, extraterrestrials. My name is Kim. This is Dustmotes in Velikor, and today we are talking about The Bone Witch by Rin Chepeko. I think I said that right. This book. Okay. Huh. How to even summarize this book? As a young girl, Teya raises her brother Fox from the dead, and in this high fantasy world that has strings attached. A mentor named Lady Mikayla comes out of the woodwork to sweep Teya and the now walking dead Fox into a whirlwind of lessons and beauty and death. So I got this book as an e-audio book from the library. There's an app called Overdrive, and you can input your library card number in from as many library systems as you want, and you can check books out as e-books and e-audio books within the app, and they download, so you download them while you're on wi-fi, and then you never have to like worry about streaming. And I just, I just, I drew like there's a world in which I can get books from the library instantly without even having to leave my couch. The only downside I have found is that when you're reading a book on your phone, people will keep talking to you, not understanding that you are reading a book. It's like, no man, this takes precedence. Leave me alone. The e-audio books are better because you've got the headphones and there's like a visual representation of I am not paying attention to you, but checks and balances. The Bone Witch is a very interesting blend of high fantasy, modern sensibilities, but only some of them, and very specific cultural parallels. It's like a high fantasy memoirs of a geisha, and there is very little that geisha and asha do not have in common, though I'm pretty sure the whole raising the dead thing wasn't part of the original Japanese tradition. Just put that out there. This is the story of a young woman becoming herself, becoming a hero, and becoming a villain. 17 year old Teya tells her story to a bard, and it's through his eyes that you see the horror of what she is becoming, but it's through her eyes that you see the injustice and the magnitude of the tragedy that has led her to become this. I cannot, I cannot express enough how much I love this book. Interestingly, this book is so high fantasy that it easily could have just dashed all of the social norms that our reality possesses, but instead, Rinchpeco picked and chose what elements she wanted to focus on, and it was just amazing to watch her take on gender norms and present it so beautifully. The first half of this book takes place with almost no men. Teya gets taken to this place called the Willows, where novice asha go to be trained and where they take their lessons. It's like an apprenticeship. And in the Willows, there are almost no men that Teya interacts with. I didn't even notice that she wasn't interacting with men as much. I didn't even notice that sexism was still a thing within this world until the asha were hosting a party and one of the other entertainers says, but you're a man as a reason for them having a difference of opinion on something. And then it was all of a sudden there again, like, oh, there are gender norms. Later in the book, we meet two different characters that are separate for a little while and then their plot lines kind of join. One is an older man and he makes the most beautiful hia, the robes and gowns that the asha wear. He is known the world over for his designs, but especially here in the Willows. And he had to fight to get there because he's a man in fashion, which in this universe is even more heavily populated by women. I really appreciated that they articulated his fight to participate in an art form that he adored and he was brilliant at. And at first they wouldn't let him. And then the other character is a young man who wants to be a dancer and he is also powerful in the rooms. He faces the criticism of a panel of asha elders telling him that there has never been a male asha in the past and there never will be. Asha have this kind of get out of jail free card when it comes to traditionally male dominated fields because they're magic. In addition to their dancing and their singing and their flower arrangements and their etiquette lessons, they learn combat. And so there are hundreds of asha who are acting as personal bodyguards in addition to being entertainers. There's no male equivalent of that and therein lies the iniquity. This is how Rin Shapetko, the author, has taken gender norms, lifted them really, really high and been like, hey, this sucks. This sucks for everyone. So basically she just she killed gender norms. She's killed it. It's great. It's fantastic. Also gay people exist in this universe and unlike daughter of the pirate king, which I read right before that, at no point does it ever use to poke fun at them or scorn them. So points. Also at no point is sexual assault used as a plot point or mentioned at all. It's fantastic. Thank you, Rin Shapetko. This book is really impressive. Really, I just love books that don't give you all the answers. They make you work for it. They make you use your brain just a little. Rin Shapetko does use a lot of foreshadowing. It's also because of the parallel storytelling timeline. 17 year old Teya will introduce the next section of young Teya and it'll like foreshadow, foreshadow, foreshadow and then it just kind of weaves itself together towards the end. But then there's some twists that you wouldn't expect. All in all, this is an excellent first book to the series and I'm so glad I read it when I did because the second book is coming out March 20th and it's called The Heart Forger and I'm just so excited. If this book sounds like your cup of tea, check it out, read it and then come talk to me because oh my god I'm in love with this book. Let me know in comments if you've read this book, if you've loved this book, if you've hated this book, if you want to read this book. Let me know because I really just started talking about books.