Bone Gap

Rating: 2 out of 5 Magical Coffee Cups

From Goodreads:

Everyone knows Bone Gap is full of gaps—gaps to trip you up, gaps to slide through so you can disappear forever. So when young, beautiful Roza went missing, the people of Bone Gap weren’t surprised. After all, it wasn’t the first time that someone had slipped away and left Finn and Sean O’Sullivan on their own. Just a few years before, their mother had high-tailed it to Oregon for a brand new guy, a brand new life. That’s just how things go, the people said. Who are you going to blame?

Finn knows that’s not what happened with Roza. He knows she was kidnapped, ripped from the cornfields by a dangerous man whose face he cannot remember. But the searches turned up nothing, and no one believes him anymore. Not even Sean, who has more reason to find Roza than anyone, and every reason to blame Finn for letting her go.

As we follow the stories of Finn, Roza, and the people of Bone Gap—their melancholy pasts, their terrifying presents, their uncertain futures—acclaimed author Laura Ruby weaves a heartbreaking tale of love and loss, magic and mystery, regret and forgiveness—a story about how the face the world sees is never the sum of who we are.

Interesting.

This is a hard book to explain. It’s not realistic, it’s not fantasy, it’s not really a mystery, I don’t know what it is exactly. I can say that whatever it was I ended up liking it. I didn’t start off liking it, but I ended up liking it.

There was some magical realism going on and I wanted more of that. Without spoiling any of the book for you I will just say there is a character that we start to learn more about but just not enough about in my opinion. I wanted more of this character and the magical realism. I want an entire book with this character as the main character or at least as the main subject of the book all wrapped up in that magic. I want this rewritten as a fairy tale. This is why I didn’t start off liking this book. I felt this book was just okay at first. I don’t think I ever wanted to give up on this book but I wasn’t running out to recommend it either at first. By the end of this book, I was craving more of all the magical and fantasy-like aspects of the story so I sort of felt let down.

Looking at my review, this just wasn’t the book for me. I would still recommend this book to certain people because it was still an interesting read. I think there are a lot of people out there that would find this book just different enough from other books they have read that they would end up loving it.

Random side note: there is an actual Bone Gap Illinois. I don’t know why but I love it when a book takes place in a real town, not like New York or Chicago but a real little town that I had never heard of before. I like looking the town up and I can’t help but wonder if this book was super popular in that town or hated in that town.