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This book was good. Great. Amazing even. It’s going to be tough but I am going to try and give it to you spoiler- free.
If you are looking for some fluffy bunny read that is going to leave you with warm fuzzies while you fall asleep and dream of unicorns, then you should look for a book by someone else. This book is dark and sometimes violent, it’s jolting reality sometimes sad and sick but true. Tarryn wants you to bleed when you read her books, to feel the injustice of the world, feel the reality like a punch in the stomach.
It took me awhile to get through this book. I even read other books the entire time, sometimes setting this one aside for a few days, but it was never out of my thoughts. I needed to let her words roll around in my brain, turn them over and over like pushing a sweet candy around in your mouth to get the full flavor.
“Sadness is an emotion you can trust. It is stronger than all of the other emotions. It makes happiness look fickle and untrustworthy. It pervades, lasts longer, and replaces the good feelings with such an eloquent ease you don’t even feel the shift until you are suddenly wrapped in its chains.”
Margo is such a complex character. So jaded and unpredictable at such a young age, you had to keep turning the pages if for no other reason then to see what she did next. Growing up in a bad neighbor hood called The Bone, with a prostitute mother, the Margo that we meet in the beginning is surprisingly soft and innocent when we first meet her. The events of the first 1/3 of the book will change her into someone completely different, and she will learn what she is truly capable of. There are so many victims in this book, and the thing I love most about it is that even in the end, Margo refuses to be one of them.
Judah is like a beacon of shining light in this story, pretty much one of the only things that brings Margo any light or happiness. The line “he wore his wheelchair, it didn’t wear him,” made me think of someone I knew once, also a good man, and this was an accurate description of him and his chair. Judah is a vivid enigma, the strangest element and the most beautiful character.
The setting of the book changes from time to time, but like the title promises, her childhood home in The Bone stays with her the entire story. Where you grow up molds you into who you are deep down, in your marrow. It calls to you, even when you leave.
The afterward of the book was so meaningful, I could recognize that the author was a fellow empath before reading her book, just from following her social media. But after reading the end of the book there was no denying it. There are some sensitive souls in this world that feel all the weight and suffering they see, and wear it like a badge, even though it isn’t theirs. It tears at your heart and keeps you up at night, just seeing a news story about (insert terrible thing here). Because no matter what the bad thing is, it kills to see it, to watch it go down. But you can’t look away, because by watching, you acknowledge their pain, just like Tarryn says in the Afterward, just like she said in the book:
“I hate that nothing can be done about the suffering of children, and that most of the world blocks out their suffering to cope with their own inability to help…….Children are vastly overlooked. Thier importance underestimated by their size.”
I would recommend this book to anyone that would listen. I am a new huge fan: I have already purchased two more of her books and declared myself a member of her following, Passionate Little Nutcases. 5/5 stars.