Before you read this review, which is of the second book in the Blood at the Root series, I’d like you to read my review of the first book, Blood at the Root. Why? Because it’s kind of fascinating just how cleanly my reading experience of Bones paralleled my reading of Blood:
I definitely and absolutely have had Malik in my classroom before. Even more so in this book than in the previous one, honestly; Williams calls Malik “messy” in his Author’s Foreword to this book, and I feel like Malik’s messiness, and to be more specific, his temper, maybe hurts him more in this book than it does in Blood. This is a kid who has been handed a raw deal by life on a ton of different levels (the magic kinda makes it better, I imagine) but one way or another he doesn’t handle it like a grown-up. Why? He’s not one.
Watching Malik navigate romantic relationships? Also super familiar.
I would say the moment where Williams absolutely stomps on the accelerator is closer to the 2/3 mark of the book than the halfway point, but while Blood came close to making me cry a couple of times– something that, let me repeat, almost never happens while I’m reading– page 368 absolutely 100% got me. Like, a literal gasp, and a well of pride, and I’m not going to pretend I was sobbing or anything but there were actual real tears.
I am not enough of a nerd that I’m going to figure out exactly what percentage of the book was finished at page 368, and you can’t make me.
NO.
It’s 67.6%, so my estimate was right on the money, fuck you.
Anyway, I referenced “twists and turns and betrayals” in the first review, and … YEAH. Along with some major reveals and some major shake-ups of what you thought you knew from the first book.
And then the Goddamned thing ends on a cliffhanger, and … remember when I was reading Godsgrave, a million years ago, and I said that I’d never been happier to have the sequel of a book on hand before finishing it? The sequel to Bones at the Crossroads hasn’t even got a release date yet, so LaDarrion Williams is about to acquire a new, and very impatient, roommate.
I will ding the book a tiny bit for dragging occasionally before that pedal-to-the-metal moment that carries through the rest of the story, and it doesn’t mean a whole lot to say this is the best book I’ve read so far this year on January 7th, but this was real real good and if you haven’t read Blood at the Root, go pick that up, and read slowly, and maybe by the time you finish Bones the end of the trilogy will be available.
Went to bed last night feeling fine, slept through the night without issue, and realized I wasn’t going to work within ten seconds of waking up this morning. I slept all day and right now I still kind of feel like hell but I’m going to try to go in tomorrow because writing lesson plans for the 3rd day of the semester is kind of a nightmare. But God forbid I forget to put up some kind of blog post, right?
I started a book the other day, a big doorstoppy, mouse-killer of a book, one I’d been really looking forward to reading, and I made it six percent of the way through the book before deciding I could not tolerate another second of it and put it down.
Then I looked at the reviews online, because I’m dumb like that, and they’re rapturous. And I’m gaslighting myself because, come on, this is objectively not a good book. There are errors of word choice and tense and the dialogue is abominable and the main character is way way way too into ogling high school girls for someone about to exit college. Today I thought about writing a review of the book, because I can’t believe people think this book is as good as they’re saying it is and I need the world to stop gaslighting me. So I went through on my Kindle, reread the first 6%, and annotated it.
Yes, I’m exactly that petty.
The problem is there were over sixty annotations– which, on one hand, I said the book was awful, but on the other hand, properly fisking this mess has become a lot of work, especially since when you export Kindle notes all it gives you is the note; it doesn’t include the bit you highlighted for the note. And, sure, I can do a bunch of screenshots, or copy and paste, and I probably don’t have to include all sixty of the notes, but that felt like a lot of work.
So what I’m going to do instead is just paste in my notes, obscuring the author’s name when necessary (although you’ll recognize the book, if you’ve read it) and y’all can tell me if you think this is worth the extra work. I will make this sacrifice for my people if you want me to. Obviously some of these are going to be obscure since you don’t see what I’m referring to, but … well, there are gonna be some patterns.
Anyway, enjoy:
Note – One > Page 3 · Location 1045 Much like the House of Lannister.
Note – One > Page 3 · Location 1046 Dumb
Note – One > Page 3 · Location 1050 Eew.
Note – One > Page 4 · Location 1063 Definitely start by sexualizing the first teenage girl in the book.
Note – One > Page 4 · Location 1064 She’s literally just glancing at her own shirt.
Note – One > Page 4 · Location 1071 Is this a thing sisters do? Grope each other?
Note – One > Page 5 · Location 1085 Note, for now, that AUTHOR is willing to spell out “dyke.”
Note – One > Page 5 · Location 1092 The hoodie is going to turn into a zip-up later.
Note – One > Page 6 · Location 1096 No one talks like this. Also, there’s no universe where Steven Biko can be mistaken for Eddie Murphy.
Note – One > Page 6 · Location 1098 Again, no one talks like this.
Note – One > Page 6 · Location 1099 As opposed to the other guard.
Note – One > Page 6 · Location 1104 Makes no sense for her to be upset.
Note – Two > Page 7 · Location 1114 “gangly” means “long-limbed”; no reason to use both words.
Note – Two > Page 8 · Location 1125 No one talks like this.
Note – Two > Page 8 · Location 1139 No one talks like this.
Note – Two > Page 9 · Location 1152 No one talks like this.
Note – Two > Page 9 · Location 1157 No one talks like this.
Note – Two > Page 10 · Location 1168 Biko is on the *back* of the hoodie, which is now a sweatshirt.
Note – Two > Page 11 · Location 1181 Definitely something you yell at your daughter in jail.
Note – Two > Page 11 · Location 1184 Just weirdly phrased.
Note – Two > Page 11 · Location 1190 Try and imagine this scenario for a second. Like, physically do it with your body. This is not a possible thing.
Note – Two > Page 11 · Location 1191 In the previous paragraph, she fell backwards over a chair and … landed on her nose? How?
Note – Two > Page 11 · Location 1194 No one talks like this.
Note – Two > Page 11 · Location 1195 Weird word choice.
Note – Two > Page 12 · Location 1200 No reason for the word “own” here.
Note – Two > Page 12 · Location 1203 No one talks like this.
Note – Two > Page 12 · Location 1205 It’s a hoodie again.
Note – Three > Page 13 · Location 1215 Weird.
Note – Three > Page 13 · Location 1218 No one talks like this.
Note – Three > Page 15 · Location 1246 Colin could use a pronoun.
Note – Three > Page 15 · Location 1257 No one talks like this.
Note – Four > Page 16 · Location 1268 These girls will never be mentioned again.
Note – Four > Page 17 · Location 1276 No one talks like this.
Note – Four > Page 18 · Location 1296 And now it’s a zipup. It’s been a regular hoodie and a sweatshirt and now it’s a zipup.
Note – Four > Page 18 · Location 1302 … is her skin moldy?
Note – Four > Page 18 · Location 1304 Why? Who randomly starts eating a sandwich in front of people? Why didn’t he eat before he went to get the hoodie, which he thought was just in a car?
Note – Four > Page 19 · Location 1311 This is the weirdest goddamn way to threaten somebody. Burned? Is it a plastic spoon?
Note – Four > Page 19 · Location 1317 Her face is in her pillow but the “shiv” is below her eye? How did they get these photos smuggled out of the prison?
Note – Four > Page 20 · Location 1343 No one talks like this.
Note – Four > Page 21 · Location 1361 I feel like burning sixty grand worth of PCP in a woodstove would at least create a noticeable smell, maybe one cops might notice, but I dunno.
Note – Four > Page 22 · Location 1370 It’s 1989. Pre-Internet. These idiots do not have contacts to sell rare manuscripts. No.
Note – Four > Page 22 · Location 1377 No one talks like this.
Note – Four > Page 23 · Location 1384 No one talks like this.
Note – Four > Page 23 · Location 1386 Glad that everyone has time to appreciate the “satisfying” sound of broken glass during this extortion attempt.
Note – Four > Page 23 · Location 1390 Unnecessary.
Note – Five > Page 24 · Location 1400 Twenty-foot doors are very large doors.
Note – Five > Page 25 · Location 1422 Again, to who?
Note – Five > Page 27 · Location 1452 All of this was in the newspaper article? Including the dialogue, with censored profanities? Has AUTHOR ever read a newspaper article?
Note – Six > Page 30 · Location 1498 I like that no one answers this question.
Note – Six > Page 30 · Location 1502 This is the second time Arthur, a college student, has ogled a teenager.
Note – Six > Page 31 · Location 1507 When does he get close enough to her to read the clue over her shoulder? And who the fuck talks like this? For either of them?
Note – Six > Page 31 · Location 1510 AUTHOR is obsessed with windows.
Note – Six > Page 32 · Location 1523 She is not nine years old. This is a grown person acting like this.
Note – Six > Page 32 · Location 1528 No one talks like this.
Note – Six > Page 32 · Location 1529 This is what you say BEFORE you open the cabinet and start rummaging through shit.
Note – Six > Page 32 · Location 1535 NO ONE TALKS LIKE THIS.
Note – Six > Page 32 · Location 1538 Donna is a complete asshole.
Note – Six > Page 32 · Location 1538 And this is where I stopped reading.
So what does family time look like when everyone in the house is an introvert?
The boy and I working on Lego sets while my wife works on a puzzle, all of us in the same room, but with minimal conversation happening, because we’re all concentrating.
I’ve been working on the Notre Dame set a few bags at a time for the last several days, but I picked up this AT-AT today and decided to take a break and get this done in one sitting. The Notre Dame set is beautiful, but it’s also crazily repetitive and I didn’t have the strength tonight to make 32 more windows or 10 more flying buttresses. I noticed the instruction manual had a link to the new Lego Builder app, and holy hell, I’m never touching one of the manuals again other than to look through them for the little flavor details they like to sprinkle through them. The app surrounds any new pieces for any particular step with a little glowing aura, making it way harder to miss them than in the manuals, and you can rotate and enlarge the model on the screen.
That’s a Goddamn game-changer right there. Lego manuals are impressively well put together 95% of the time, but sometimes there’s just no way to display a step with one single perfect angle, and letting me zoom and rotate at will was just amazing. Plus they gave me stats at the end, and y’all know how much I like stats. Turns out if you were to stack all of the pieces in that AT-AT on top of one another (I assume the long way, and not actually attaching them to each other?) it would be 6 meters high! I also managed to put together 7 pieces per minute in the hour and fifteen minutes it took me to put the set together. I don’t know what the hell I could possibly do with that information, but I love that I have it.
Honestly, this wasn’t a great month, with more DNFs than usual. We’re going to call Shadows upon Time the Book of the Month, and The Blackfire Blade, The Scour, and His Majesty’s Dragon were standouts among the rest.
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