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4.0
The Spirit Bares Its Teeth
ByPublisher Description
Mors vincit omnia. Death conquers all.Mors vincit omnia. Death conquers all.
London, 1883. The Veil between the living and dead has thinned. Violet-eyed mediums commune with spirits under the watchful eye of the Royal Speaker Society, and sixteen-year-old Silas Bell would rather rip out his violet eyes than become an obedient Speaker wife. According to Mother, he’ll be married by the end of the year. It doesn’t matter that he’s needed a decade of tutors to hide his autism; that he practices surgery on slaughtered pigs; that he is a boy, not the girl the world insists on seeing.
After a failed attempt to escape an arranged marriage, Silas is diagnosed with Veil sickness—a mysterious disease sending violet-eyed women into madness—and shipped away to Braxton’s Sanitorium and Finishing School. The facility is cold, the instructors merciless, and the students either bloom into eligible wives or disappear. So when the ghosts of missing students start begging Silas for help, he decides to reach into Braxton’s innards and expose its rotten guts to the world—as long as the school doesn’t break him first.
London, 1883. The Veil between the living and dead has thinned. Violet-eyed mediums commune with spirits under the watchful eye of the Royal Speaker Society, and sixteen-year-old Silas Bell would rather rip out his violet eyes than become an obedient Speaker wife. According to Mother, he’ll be married by the end of the year. It doesn’t matter that he’s needed a decade of tutors to hide his autism; that he practices surgery on slaughtered pigs; that he is a boy, not the girl the world insists on seeing.
After a failed attempt to escape an arranged marriage, Silas is diagnosed with Veil sickness—a mysterious disease sending violet-eyed women into madness—and shipped away to Braxton’s Sanitorium and Finishing School. The facility is cold, the instructors merciless, and the students either bloom into eligible wives or disappear. So when the ghosts of missing students start begging Silas for help, he decides to reach into Braxton’s innards and expose its rotten guts to the world—as long as the school doesn’t break him first.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesThe Spirit Bares Its Teeth Reviews
4.0
“Seeing how Silas's perspective on relationships, settings, and feelings are described through medical terms because of their fixation of surgeries blew my mind away!! I found it so fun to visualize what Silas is describing through the imagery of flesh and surgical procedures. In regards to the romance in the story, I find Silas and Daphne's relationship to be beautiful, especially one of their intimate moments of helping each other dress the other up in the final chapters. Something about Daphne being Silas's safe space where the bunny is no longer yapping and the longing to be as close to her as physically possible is so special to me. (〃´▽`) The part where Silas is ripping Viscount Luckenbill's eyes out was so satisfying after I thought Headmaster got off too easy and had an "off screen" death. As a lesbian, I love that Mary was able to have Frances' spirit with her through the ring and that she had her moments with Frances. I sooo badly would love to see more of her in those final chapters because we were just seeing her open up!! ((T_T))
I must say that I hoped for more parts where Daphne, Mary, and Silas are bonding after all that they went through because I longed for more happier and/or calmer moments after the back-to-back traumatic events Silas has been through with the Headmaster, George, and Viscount Luckenbill. Some more world building around the Royal Speaker Society and the differences of how violet-eyed women are treated across various countries would be amazing to me.”
“This was a hard read, but in a good way. It made me feel a lot of things.”
“this book ripped me open and dug out my insides, man. as a trans and autistic person who’s spent most of their life feeling wrong, i feel so viscerally seen in this book it’s unreal. made me tear up many times. would HIGHLY recommend if you are also trans and autistic”
Diverse representationLikeableMultilayeredOriginalRelatableUnforgettable protagonistAddictiveSteady pacingWell-structuredAtmosphericEvocative imageryHistoricalSetting fits the storyBeautifully-writtenDescriptiveEasy to readOriginalAbleismAbuseBigotryChild abuseDeathDomestic violenceMisogynyMurderSexual assaultTransphobiaViolence
About Andrew Joseph White
Andrew Joseph White is a queer, trans author from Virginia, where he grew up falling in love with monsters and wishing he could be one too. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from George Mason University in 2022 and has a habit of cuddling random street cats. Andrew writes about trans kids with claws and fangs, and what happens when they bite back.
Other books by Andrew Joseph White
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