V.E. SchwabFantasy · Fiction·b. 1987
Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil
Synopsis
Spanning five centuries and three continents, Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil braids together the lives of three women bound by hunger, love, and rage. In 1532, María — restless and copper-haired — is trapped in a suffocating marriage until an ageless widow named Sabine offers her a monstrous kind of freedom.
In 1827, Charlotte is exiled to a London aunt after she is caught kissing another girl, where another mysterious widow teaches her she can be free to love as she chooses. And in present-day Boston, Alice wakes after a one-night stand unable to bear sunlight, with two new fangs and a thirst she cannot explain.
As their stories reach across time and slowly intertwine, V.E. Schwab spins a sweeping, sapphic vampire saga about immortality as both gift and curse — about the women who make us and the ones we become. It is a novel of appetite in every sense: for blood, for freedom, for love that refuses to be small.
Lush, furious, and elegiac, Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil is Schwab's darkly romantic meditation on power, hunger, and the long shadow of the choices we make to survive.
How it reads
- Writing2.7
- Impact2.7
- Characters3.0
- Plot2.3
- Atmosphere3.3
Prose complexity 7/10
Spice level
2.0 avg spice
Content warnings (7)
ViolenceAbuseChild DeathSexual ContentGraphic ViolenceTraumaDeath Of A Parent
Readers say (2)Slow · Dense · Dark · Atmospheric · Romantic · Multiple POVs · Morally Grey
Readers flagged (7)
ViolenceAbuseChild DeathSexual ContentGraphic ViolenceTraumaDeath Of A Parent
- Odiei. Achei uma leitura muitoooo parada e repetitiva, com certeza não é meu tipo de livro. Achei um saco ler, me senti torturada. Todas as personagens são insuportáveis. As 3 tiveram desenvolvimento de personagem negativo, ficaram mais chatas e não aprenderam absolutamente nada com as ações delas. Normalmente em um livro de fantasia bom você termina e fica um tempo tentando digerir todas as informações e coisas que você aprendeu ou refletiu. Nesse não tenho nada a digerir, apenas q gastei meu tempo lendo esse livro de 640 páginas q poderia ter tido metade do tamanho
- <div>I love her.<br>I love her.<br>I love her.<br><br></div><div>Nobody writes like V.E. Schwab. Not right now. Maybe not ever. <br><br></div><div>There’s this rawness to her prose that never feels like it’s trying too hard, even when it leans into melodrama. It doesn’t come across as manufactured. It feels lived in. It feels like truth, dressed in just enough shadow to make you lean in closer. <br><br></div><div><em>Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil</em> does exactly what Schwab always seems to do — it builds a world that hums just under the skin, full of grief, ghosts, and people you’d follow into the dark. Every character felt distinct and haunted in their own way. I wanted more of them. I wanted time to sit with the ones I didn’t understand yet. <br><br></div><div>If I have one complaint, it’s this: the ending felt like someone hit fast forward. We spent 85 percent of the book laying out the architecture of this place, this mood, this mythology... and then the last 15 percent felt like a race to tie it all up. Not a bad ending, just one that didn’t get the breathing room it earned. <br><br></div><div>Still, this one’s going to stay with me. It always comes back to the characters with Schwab. She writes like she knows them personally. Like maybe they wrote her first. <br><br></div><div>Have I mentioned I love V.E. Schwab? </div>
- Genre: Sapphic Gothic Fantasy 🥀💙 | 📍 Tropes/Themes: Vampires; Woman Empowerment; Feminine Rage; Told over 3 Timelines: Set in 1532 Santa Domingo de la Calzada: Spaniard Viscountess; Set in 1827 London: English Debutante; Set in 2019 Boston: Scottish Immigrant College Student; Multi 3rd Person POV | ⚠️CW: blood and blood drinking, toxic relationships, violence, death, death of a parent, injury and injury details, murder, gore, alcohol use, grief, suicide, sexual harassment, misogyny, sexism, sexual content, child death, fire injury/fire, homophobia, domestic abuse, panic attacks, toxic relationship, emotional abuse, reference to World Wars | 🔥: 🌶️🌶️ | Format: hardcover 📕 | 💭Thoughts: | Three very unique women, all incredibly strong in their own rights, intertwined together in hundreds of years of webs. Simply incredible, but there’s nothing simple about this book. Complex, tangled, emotional - I was lost in the pages from start to finish. I can’t wait for my next V.E. Schwab read
- Genre: Sapphic Gothic Fantasy 🥀💙 📍 Tropes/Themes: Vampires; Woman Empowerment; Feminine Rage; Told over 3 Timelines: Set in 1532 Santa Domingo de la Calzada: Spaniard Viscountess; Set in 1827 London: English Debutante; Set in 2019 Boston: Scottish Immigrant College Student; Multi 3rd Person POV ⚠️CW: blood and blood drinking, toxic relationships, violence, death, death of a parent, injury and injury details, murder, gore, alcohol use, grief, suicide, sexual harassment, misogyny, sexism, sexual content, child death, fire injury/fire, homophobia, domestic abuse, panic attacks, toxic relationship, emotional abuse, reference to World Wars Format: hardcover 📕 💭Thoughts: Three very unique women, all incredibly strong in their own rights, intertwined together in hundreds of years of webs. Simply incredible, but there’s nothing simple about this book. Complex, tangled, emotional - I was lost in the pages from start to finish. I can’t wait for my next V.E. Schwab read
- I am very impressed by V. E Schwab, and I want to read more of her books now! This was a long slowish book, that didn't bore me and kept me glued to it because it's soooo well written! And also because vampires, ''toxic lesbian vampires'' (the words V. E Schwab used) to be more specific. Apart from vampirism and possessive toxic love, this was in my opinion a study on grief, the loss of the ones you love and the loss of oneself. It's also about monstrosity, difference and self acceptance. Are monsters made, born, or created along the way? And the ending tied it all together perfectly!!
- Toxic relationships. Grief. Power struggles. Loss of identity. This book contains it all. It???s not by any means perfect but I enjoyed every minute of it.