The Bones Beneath My Skin

Name: The Bones Beneath My Skin
Rating: 4.147 (7886 reviews)
ISBN: 9781250890443

By TJ Klune

Publisher Description

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES, USA TODAY AND INDIE BESTSELLER!

A spine-tingling standalone novel by #1 New York Times bestselling author TJ Klune—a supernatural road-trip thriller featuring an extraordinary young girl and her two unlikely protectors on the run from cultists and the government.

There's nothing more human than a broken heart.

In the spring of 1995, Nate Cartwright has lost everything: his parents are dead, his only brother wants nothing to do with him, and he's been fired from his job as a journalist in Washington, DC.

With nothing left to lose, he returns to his family's summer cabin outside the small mountain town of Roseland, Oregon, to try and find some sense of direction. The cabin should be empty. It's not.

Inside is a man named Alex. And with him is an extraordinary ten-year-old girl who calls herself Artemis Darth Vader. Artemis, who isn't exactly as she appears.

Soon it becomes clear that Nate must make a choice: let himself drown in the memories of his past, or fight for a future he never thought possible. Because the girl is special. And forces are descending upon them who want nothing more than to control her.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

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The Bones Beneath My Skin Reviews

4.0

Carly MacRae

Created 1 minute ago

DolphinKate

Created about 16 hours ago

Logan Johnson

Created about 22 hours ago

“Congratulations, we have found a book where the protagonist has roughly the same amount of agency as a sexy lamp! And slightly less personality. Actually, that’s an insult to the lamp: some lamps have a lot of love and care baked in, and a lot of craftsmanship involved in their creation. I cannot get over how consistently useless Nate is. For someone whose job is to interact with people and convey ideas succinctly, he deeply sucks at it. He goes through this book with the rough emotional and social maturity of a middle schooler, and strikes me as someone who ought to be dressed in frilly Victorian gowns and fainting every so often. At a certain point it stopped being annoying and just became vaguely amusing. This book has so much nothing. I would find myself reading a dozen pages and realizing that nothing of note had happened or changed. There are technically action set pieces and plot points, but they are so cartoonish and unsubtle that I don’t have any kind of investment into them. I could nitpick about the rules of the story, the limits of Art’s abilities, the existence of competent shadowy government agencies, the nuts and bolts of how the narrative fits together. But honestly, I am so beyond caring at this point. I understand the idea of leaving some things mysterious in a story, using hard cuts to disrupt the narrative, trying to mimic what an experience feels like in text. There’s no point in predicting what comes next. But doing so comes at the cost of my investment, since I can’t meaningfully engage with a story beyond seeing where it goes. What happens is down to the convenience of the author, not the rules of the story or setting. I think Artemis was meant to be charming? I kinda appreciate how little she changes over the course of the story: no need to add in a real character arc to complicate all this nothing. The amount of bacon obsession in this novel makes me think back to 2011. The entire Peter/Oren plotline was just annoying, tedious, underexplained, and unnecessary. I detest stories that rely on mind control, and this was no exception. I guess Ruth was kind of a bright spot for her tiny appearances? Alex is a character that actually does things sometimes? Very much not my thing. Not everything has to be. 1.35/5”

About TJ Klune

TJ KLUNE is the #1 New York Times and #1 USA Today bestselling, Lambda Literary Award-winning author of The House in the Cerulean Sea, Somewhere Beyond the Sea, Under the Whispering Door, In the Lives of Puppets, the Green Creek Series for adults, the Extraordinaries Series for teens, and more. Being queer himself, Klune believes it's important—now more than ever—to have accurate, positive queer representation in stories.

Other books by TJ Klune

The Stars Look Like Home