California Bones by Greg Van Eekhout
The start of this book is like a grisly car crash you can sense is coming but cannot look away from and I was sucked straight in. In the opening scene we meet a Daniel Blackland who is being fed a piece of Krakken bone fragment by his father. He is an Osteomancer meaning he draws magic from bone and flesh. It is his first taste of magic and the start of his journey to become a living and breathing weapon. Six years later his father is brutally killed and EATEN by the big bad Hierarch and Daniel must flee from everything he knows or risk being the second course as powers can come from not only eating old bones of creatures today we define as mythical but eating the bones of fellow Osteomancers.
“Ten years later, he would still hear the sound of the Hierarch’s teeth grinding his father’s cartilage”.
We next see Daniel, probably in his late teens, running a crew of thieves in down town LA and the fun really starts, as it becomes a story about a heist. We have a really great cast of core characters that you cannot help but root for, even if they do play into the archetypes a bit. It feels a little like the start of a video game as each member has his or her specific traits and skills and different ways of completing the job. Moth is the muscle and has incredible strength and regenerative powers, Jo is a shape shifter who can morph into anyone and Cass can break into or unlock anything. Together they work for Otis, Daniel’s crime boss Uncle, and it is he who sets them on a mission to recover a sword crafted by Daniel’s father.
A rare and wonderful combination of all the things I knew I enjoyed in a story and some I did not, California Bones is a fantastic book and one I would highly recommend. I’d not read much Urban fantasy before this and having it set where I live gave the whole thing an extra dimension similar to what Londoners may have felt when heading down to the platform of the tube station during the Harry Potter madness. I’ve found myself looking at old things in a new away and see darkness and possibilities where before there was previously only a dirty canal and it is because Eekhout has managed to give his vision of California a soul of it’s own.
You can even see what the characters in the book physically look like thanks to Greg and TOR if you follow this link.
http://www.tor.com/blogs/2015/01/heres-what-the-characters-from-california-bones-look-like-before-they-start-eating-each-other
I found this article really helpful and it helped the characters feel familiar and relatable.
California Bones gets 4.5 stars from me and at 300 pages it was a relatively quick and easy read and delivered far more than I expected. It will leave with dirt underneath your fingernails, a drop of sweat running down the side of your face and the occasional feeling that whatever’s stuck in your teeth could maybe impart some magical powers upon you. I will be jumping into the sequel Pacific Fire very soon thanks to Greg, Netgalley and, once again, those wonderful people at TOR.
For more you can follow @torbooks @gregvaneekhout @fantasyfaction and @areadingmachine
