Review: Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil

The Fussy Stuff

Title: Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil

Author: V.E. Schwab

Narrator: Katie Leung, Marisa Calin, Julia Whelan

Format: Audiobook

Genre: Fiction, Fantasy, Historical, LGBTQIA+

Quick Take: A dark, lyrical, and genuinely sweeping story that does what only the best books do: makes you ask what you would have done, and then keeps raising the stakes of that question across centuries.

My Take

There is a specific kind of book that lights up my imagination in a way nothing else quite does. Not just a story I enjoy, but one that pulls me out of my world entirely and drops me inside it. The kind where I stop being a reader and start being a participant. Where I am no longer following what the characters decide, but asking, urgently and personally: what would I do if that were me?

I love those books. I seek them out. And this is one of them.

What makes Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil particularly fun for me is that it does not just ask that question once. It asks it over and over, across different women, different centuries, different sets of impossible circumstances. Each time the stakes shift. Each time the answer might be different. You are not working through a single “what would I do” moment and moving on. You are sitting with it across the entire sweep of the story, watching how much your answer changes depending on who you are, when you are, and what the world around you will and will not allow.

That is where this book earns its place. Not just in asking the question, but in how thoughtfully it manipulates it.

The women in this story are not versions of the same person. They are shaped differently by their times and their circumstances, and they make choices that reflect that. Two women facing something similar, separated by a hundred years, can respond in completely opposite ways. And the book never tells you which one was right. It just holds both, and lets you sit with them, and quietly asks: what about you?

The prose is genuinely beautiful. Lyrical in a way that feels earned, not decorative. This is a dense, sweeping story with a lot of threads running through it, and the writing is what holds it together. Schwab trusts her readers, and the book rewards that trust.

The LGBTQIA+ themes are woven through with the same care the rest of the book brings to everything it touches. The darkness is real, and it does not flinch. But underneath all of it there is something hopeful, and it does not feel cheap. It feels earned.

Fair warning: this is not a light read. It is a lot of book, and it asks for your full attention. Give it that, and it gives you a great deal back.

SPOILERS (skip if you want to go in fresh)

One thing about this book that might bug you… The villain is not a mystery. You know who she is from the go. But the book makes you understand her, which is so much harder and more interesting than simply revealing her. Not excuse her: some of what she does is genuinely deplorable. But understand her. I found myself following her logic, feeling the pull of her reasoning, even as I watched her cross lines I couldn’t defend. Still, she is a villain you can see yourself in, just a little. That is far more unsettling than one you can simply despise from a safe distance. And it adds one more layer to the question the book keeps asking: what would I do? Would I become her, given infinite time and unbelievable pressure?

End of spoilers.

I finished this book still turning it over. Still asking. I did not have clean answers, and I am not sure I was supposed to. That is exactly what a book like this should do.

Unfussed Verdict

If you are the kind of reader who loves a book that lights up your imagination and refuses to let you stay on the outside of it, this one is for you. Dark, sweeping, beautifully written, and genuinely worth the commitment.

Unfussed Homework (Optional, Obviously)

Think about a book that made you ask what you would have done, and whether your answer changed depending on the character you were following. Is there one circumstance in the story where you felt certain, and another where you genuinely had no idea? That gap is worth sitting with.