The Bone Weaver’s Orchard - A Stoker Award Winning Debut
There are books that sometimes sit on my shelf to read for a long time and for no real reason I never pick them up. Sometimes a book gets buried underneath new books and I forget that it’s there. Sometimes other books come and I get excited to read them and pick them up before getting to the ones I’ve had longer. I’m not sure what happened with The Bone Weaver’s Orchard by Sarah Read but it was clearly a mistake on my part because I’ve been missing out the entire time I had this book and didn’t pick it up to read.
What finally did it for me was seeing this novel win the Stoker Award for best debut novel. It was then I realized I was probably missing out and I started reading it the next day. Once I started, I regretted each day it sat on my shelf unread. This is a fantastic novel and for me, the protagonist is written to perfection. In fact, Charley, the main character in this deeply imaginative story, is one of my favorite protagonists of all time.
The plot centers on Charley as he starts his first year at a new boarding school. He runs into some trouble early on because of his intense fascination with bugs and insects which rubs a lot of his classmates and the school staff the wrong way. This makes Charley an outcast with many of the students and he’s often by himself. While Charley is working to fit in as best he can, a few students disappear and Charley and the other the students are told they ran away from the school. One of the students that ran away is Charley’s only real friend at the school. Charley doesn’t believe his friend would just run off and he begins to uncover the mystery of what happened to his friend, and so many other children at the school over the years.
Read does an incredible job of setting up the mystery and keeping the creep factor extremely high. I don’t want to give too much of the book away because the questions I asked myself as I made my way through this book only made the reading of it that much more enjoyable. It was a horror book for sure, but the mystery and trying to discover, along with Charley, exactly what was happening at his school (along with getting to know Charley) was the best part of the book.
The Bone Weaver’s Orchard reads as much like a great mystery book as it does a horror book. But don’t let that fool you, this is 100% horror all the way. There are some gruesome scenes and the tension builds all the way through the book. The end is fast paced and left me exhausted from the intense action. This is Spine Chilling Kids week at Horror Bound and this possibly haunted school is the perfect place to find some creepy kid scenes.
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