Your Blood, My Bones - Kelly Andrew

Initial Draw: ☆☆☆
Character Development: ☆☆
Plot/Writing Style: ☆☆
Overall: ⭐⭐

From the cover:

"Wyatt Westlock has one plan for the farmhouse she's just inherited - to burn it to the ground. But during her final walkthrough of her childhood home, she makes a shocking discovery in the basement - Peter, the boy she once considered her best friend, strung up in chains and left for dead.

Unbeknownst to Wyatt, Peter has suffered hundreds of ritualistic deaths on her family's property. Semi-immortal, Peter never remains dead for long, but he can't really live, either. Not while he's bound to the farm, locked in a cycle of grisly deaths and painful rebirths. There's only one way for him to break free. He needs to end the Westlock line.

He needs to kill Wyatt.

With Wyatt's parents gone, the spells protecting the property have begun to unravel, and dark, ancient forces gather in the nearby forest. The only way for Wyatt to repair the wards is to work with Peter - the one person who knows how to harness her volatile magic. But how can she trust a boy who's sworn an oath to destroy her? When the past turns up to haunt them in the most unexpected way, they are forced to rely on one another to survive, or else tear each other apart."

📚📚📚

 Look...I'm going to start this review by acknowledging that this type of book? Really not for me. It isn't my cup of tea, it's never something I'm going to seek out, and I read it more out of obligation than anything else. Disclaimer having been made, I'll also say that the synopsis from the cover makes it sound so much more suspenseful and spooky than it actually ended up being. Former friends, dark secrets, one plotting murder, but then...a grisly twist forces them together. 

Instead, what the reader gets is things revealed that don't totally make sense to reveal, then the narrative sort of pretending like those things haven't been revealed and tiptoeing around them with weird hints even though, hello, that's not a secret! All while things that it would actually make sense to reveal to the reader are inexplicably kept a secret. I didn't totally understand how the author chose what to reveal and what to keep hidden, and it made things both frustrating and a little boring. Maybe I was supposed to get swept up in how Wyatt didn't yet know the things I did, but trying to do that just didn't do it for me.

Add to that that nothing much really happened and...eh. Don't get me wrong, there were a few creepy-lite moments, but thinking back on my reading experience, it was pages and pages of angsty arguing between Wyatt and Peter and then like a few paragraphs of oh my god! And then immediately back to the angsty arguing. It would have been forgivable if all the back and forth between them furthered the story, but it was just rehashing the exact same plot point over and over with no new development. No thank you. Begging you to pick up the pace. 

Maybe I would have gotten more swept away in everything if horror was more my thing, but I don't know. If anything, I feel like my aversion to anything in this vein should have meant even horror-lite gave me the shivers. Instead, I was three hundred pages in and checking to see how much was left, wondering if something was actually going to happen at some point. Spoiler alert: Not really! My approach when I write fiction is "write these big scenes that I already have in my head!" and then "FUCK, now I have to fill in around these, how do I do that?" And this book very much read like that. They had an idea for a beginning, they had an idea for the end, and then...uhh....

Anyway, I totally thought I had finished this review and scheduled it to post yesterday, and I just realized that was not the case. So...enjoy, it was mostly done.