Thank you to the Fantastic Flying Book Club for giving me the opportunity to be on the blog tour for Bone Crier’s Moon!
I’d had my eye on this gorgeous book even before joining their blog tour, and ahh, I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to be sharing this post.
Don’t miss the excerpt and giveaway at the end of this post!
Bone Crier’s Moon (Bone Grace #1) by Kathryn Purdie
Publisher: HarperCollins/Katherine Tegen ReleaseDate: March 10, 2020 Genre: Young Adult, Fantasy
Synopsis
Bone Criers have a sacred duty. They alone can keep the dead from preying on the living. But their power to ferry the spirits of the dead into goddess Elara’s Night Heavens or Tyrus’s Underworld comes from sacrifice. The gods demand a promise of dedication. And that promise comes at the cost of the Bone Criers’ one true love.
Ailesse has been prepared since birth to become the matriarch of the Bone Criers, a mysterious famille of women who use strengths drawn from animal bones to ferry dead souls. But first she must complete her rite of passage and kill the boy she’s also destined to love.
Bastien’s father was slain by a Bone Crier and he’s been seeking revenge ever since. Yet when he finally captures one, his vengeance will have to wait. Ailesse’s ritual has begun and now their fates are entwined—in life and in death.
Sabine has never had the stomach for the Bone Criers’ work. But when her best friend Ailesse is taken captive, Sabine will do whatever it takes to save her, even if it means defying their traditions—and their matriarch—to break the bond between Ailesse and Bastien. Before they all die.
Favorite Quotes
🖤 “Tu ne me manque pas. Je ne te manque pas. It means ‘You’re not missing from me. I’m not missing from you’”
🖤 “Any flaws at first glance are only virtues in disguise.”
Fingers of mist curled around Bastien’s father as he walked away from his only child. The boy lifted up on his knees in their stalled handcart. “Where are you going, Papa?”
His father didn’t answer. The light of the full moon shone on Lucien’s chestnut hair, and the mist swallowed him from sight.
Alone, Bastien sank back down and tried to be quiet. Stories of cutthroat robbers on forest roads ran rampant through his ten-year-old mind. Don’t be afraid, he told himself. Papa would have warned me if there was any danger. But his father was gone now, and Bastien began to doubt.
Outside the city walls, the idle cart offered little shelter. Bastien’s skin crawled at phantom whispers. His breath caught when the branches around him formed claws.
I should follow Papa right now, he thought, but the nighttime chill seeped into his bones and filled them with lead. He shivered, pressed up against the limestone sculptures in the cart. Tyrus, god of the Underworld, stared back at him, his mouth chiseled in a wry line. Bastien’s father had carved the figurine months ago, but it never sold. People preferred the sun god and the earth goddess, worshipping life and disregarding death.
Bastien turned his head, hearing a song without words. Lilting. Primal. Sad. Like the soft cry of a child or the plaintive call of a bird or a harrowing ballad of lost love. The song swelled inside him, achingly beautiful. Almost as beautiful as the woman standing on the bridge, for Bastien, like his father, soon followed the music there.
The mist settled, and a thick fog rolled in from the Nivous Sea. The breeze played with the ends of the woman’s dark amber hair. Her white dress swished, exposing her slim ankles and bare feet. She wasn’t singing. The music poured from a bone-white flute at her mouth. Bastien should have recognized her for what she was then.
She set the flute on the parapet when Lucien met her in the middle of the bridge. The hazy moonlight cast them in an unearthly glow.
Bastien faltered, unable to take another step. What if this was a dream? Perhaps he’d fallen asleep in his father’s cart.
Then his father and the woman started dancing.
Her movements were slow, breathtaking, graceful. She glided through the fog like a swan on water. Lucien never looked away from her midnight-dark eyes.
Bastien didn’t either, but when the dance ended, he blinked twice. What if he wasn’t dreaming?
The bone-white flute caught his eye again. Dread dropped hot coals in his stomach. Was the flute really made of bone?
Legends of Bone Criers rushed back to him and clashed warning bells through his mind. The women in white were said to stalk these parts of Galle. Bastien’s father wasn’t a superstitious man—he never avoided bridges during a full moon—but he should have, for here he was, enchanted like all doomed men in the tales. Every story was alike. Each had a bridge and dancing…and what happened afterward. Now was when—
Bastien sprang forward. “Papa! Papa!”
His father, who adored him, who carried him on his shoulder and sang him lullabies, never turned to heed his son.
The Bone Crier withdrew a bone knife. She leapt straight into the air—higher than a roe deer—and with the force of her descent, she plunged the blade deep into his father’s heart.
Bastien’s scream raged as guttural as a grown man’s. It carved his chest hollow with pain he would harbor for years.
He ran onto the bridge, collapsed beside his father, and met the woman’s falsely sorry eyes. She glanced behind her at another woman at the bridge’s end, who beckoned with a hasty hand.
The first woman lifted the bloody bone knife to her palm, like she meant to cut herself to complete the ritual. But with one last look at Bastien, she cast the knife into the forest and fled, leaving the boy with a dead father and a lesson seared forever in his memory:
Kathryn is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the BURNING GLASS series. Her love of storytelling began as a young girl when her dad told her about someone named Boo Radley while they listened to the film score of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. Kathryn is a trained classical actress who studied at the Oxford School of Drama. She also writes songs on her guitar for each of her stories and shares them on her website. Kathryn lives in the Rocky Mountains with her husband and three children.
1 thought on “Bone Crier’s Moon Book Review, Excerpt, and Giveaway”
This was one of my favorite books last month. The mythology was amazing and I loved the french inspired setting and culture. Can’t wait to read the next book!
Bone Criers have a sacred duty. They alone can keep the dead from preying on the living. But their power to ferry the spirits of the dead into goddess Elara’s Night Heavens or Tyrus’s Underworld comes from sacrifice. The gods demand a promise of dedication. And that promise comes at the cost of the Bone Criers’ one true love.
Kathryn is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the BURNING GLASS series. Her love of storytelling began as a young girl when her dad told her about someone named Boo Radley while they listened to the film score of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. Kathryn is a trained classical actress who studied at the Oxford School of Drama. She also writes songs on her guitar for each of her stories and shares them on her website. Kathryn lives in the Rocky Mountains with her husband and three children.
Morgan Vega 
This was one of my favorite books last month. The mythology was amazing and I loved the french inspired setting and culture. Can’t wait to read the next book!
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