This is going to be One of Those Reviews, I think. I am beginning this review at 7:30 PM on Saturday, which, you will notice, was yesterday. You may have noticed that yesterday-which-for-me-is-still-today’s post is also a book review.

I am writing the second book review of the day because I woke up this morning, read the last two hundred pages of To Cage a God, wrote a review, ate lunch, took a shower, and then read The Sins on Their Bones fucking cover-to-cover in what wasn’t quite a literal single sitting but may as well have been. The eArc I read was four hundred and eighteen pages. I read the entire book in roughly six hours, less if you deduct a couple of pee breaks, some light web surfing and doom scrolling, and a few pieces of frozen pizza for dinner.

The real miracle? I don’t have a physical copy of this book. I’ve read plenty of books in a single sitting before. I don’t think I’ve ever done that with an ebook. Like, literally never. This is the first time.

I also paused to order the book from Amazon, because I got sent this by a publicist in return for a review, and I don’t actually have a physical copy. It comes out May 7th.

You may be wondering what I meant by “one of those reviews” in the first paragraph, there. Here’s the thing: This book started out as an uh-oh, developed into something I was grudgingly respecting, and then moved into fuck it, five stars territory by ending very well. I’ll get into what it’s actually about in a few minutes but it’s very much the type of book that if I talk about too much you’ll think I hated it. I did not! I liked it a lot. But all of the interesting things I have to say about it are gonna feel like gripes. I’m annoying that way sometimes.

But let’s talk about To Cage a God for a second more, because, completely by accident, this book echoes that one quite a lot. Both are set in a proto-Russian setting, with roughly eighteenth- or nineteenth-century technology (guns are mentioned in Bones, but don’t really belong on the cover) and both are mostly about a plot to remove an unjust ruler. Both have substantial gay representation; both have magic, although we’ll get to talking about Sins on their Bones’ magic in a bit. The good guys even get into the bad guys’ palace at the end with more or less the exact same deception, which is one bloody odd coincidence. For a while, I was genuinely concerned that reading both of them in one day was poisoning my opinion of Bones, but as I said: once it heats up it heats up fast.

Let’s go back to the queer representation: I feel bad about complaining about this, but Sins on Their Bones might actually have too much, as I’m pretty sure that literally every character in the book with a speaking role is queer, including two tzars and the entire surviving court of the deposed one. One character gets to give a whole speech about being asexual. I did not notice any trans characters but the rest of the book is so gay that I genuinely think I probably missed an obvious clue somewhere; I refuse to believe everyone in this book is cisgendered. There’s a throwaway line at the end of the book about someone receiving a ton of marriage proposals from across the continent, implying that every other ruling family is super gay too. And there’s a point where someone has to convince a side character who has barely appeared in the book at all that they knew each other as kids, and he tells her that he remembers her first crush, which was on another girl, because of course it was.

And, like, the main character is the deposed tzar, who is married to the guy who deposed him, and he and his court are in hiding for most of the book. He’s very mopey about it. You’ve seen Monty Python’s Holy Grail, right? Remember the bit with the prince in the castle who just wanted to sing? Imagine that guy was the tzar of Russia, only instead of singing, he wanted to have sex with his husband. That’s the vibe for a lot of the book. He snaps out of it eventually, but he’s very sad for basically the whole first half. Also drunk. And the interactions between the main group of characters really don’t feel like an exiled potentate and his court. They’re more like a bunch of grad students in a polycule. At one point they go to a magic library– the magic library is probably my favorite part of the book and I would gleefully read an entire book about Aleksandr, the librarian, and his disembodied head coffee table, and no, I’m not explaining that. But they go to the magic library and they’re sitting in a room listening to the librarian talk and one character sits on another one’s lap. There’s a bit where they’re expositing at each other early in the book and three of them are basically lying in a cuddlelump on the floor.

I don’t know any kings and I definitely don’t know any tzars but I feel like typically the word “cuddlelump” doesn’t get applied to them often. And from now on whenever I think about Cabinet meetings I’m going to imagine Pete Buttigieg walking in and confidently sitting on Merrick Garland’s lap, and none of you can stop me.

Also, everybody’s Jewish, except they aren’t, and I don’t know how I feel about that. Now, Jewish mysticism and Jewish magic are a thing, and they are fascinating, and I have read several really goddamn good books that take inspiration from Kabbalah. The phrase “inspired by Jewish mysticism” was half of what got me to jump at the chance to read this early. But the word “Jewish” doesn’t show up anywhere in this book, and the place names are all clearly drawn from real places in Russia, and it’s not like it’s a pastiche on Judaism, these folks are Ashkenazi Jewish. They’re praying in Hebrew and wearing prayer shawls and the names of God play a big role and churches are called shuls and there are angels whose names are clearly only barely modified from their Biblical equivalents, and it’s so obviously Judaism that it’s really weird to me that the author didn’t just make them Jewish. There are literal Bible quotes scattered around, just without actual chapter and verse references. I mean, there wasn’t ever a Jewish tzar of Russia, but there wasn’t a gay tzar of Russia either, nor did the gay Jewish tzar of Russia have a nonbinary person and an asexual person and a bisexual person and the fourth person was probably the trans person and I didn’t catch it, in their inner court. If we’re gonna go with homonormative 18th century Russia, we can also have homonormative 18th century Russian Jews.

I dunno. The author is Jewish, and I’m not, and I’m not, like, offended by it or anything, but I feel like you can only draw so much “inspiration” from Jewish mysticism before you have to just admit that everybody is an actual Jewish mystic. Like, the big plan to stop the bad guy at the end, and I’m not going to get more specific because spoilers? I know exactly where that came from.

Also, and this is probably just me being petty, but the evil tzar is called “Moy Tzar” nearly every time he’s referred to in the book and there is no other Russian anywhere, and it’s italicized each and every time, and … blech.

So like I said: I have lots of gripes, but … six hours. One sitting. On an ebook. Which I then spent real money to get a physical copy of. I have not quite gone so far as to put this on my end-of-year list, but we’ll see how I feel about it in a week. Go pre-order it, and you can read it on May 7th.

And, finally, because I can’t resist: