These play a pretty importat role in the plot. They are singers, dancers and warriors! I thought this was lovely, because usually, women are portrayed as one or the other, but here, the author says that women can do it all! In fact, through one of Tea’s friends, a boy who wants to be an asha instead of a soldier in the army, the author challenges traditional gender roles.Īnother is the concept of a heartsglass, which is basically a necklace that one wears, which contains one’s “heart” and which has a colour based on one’s abilities, and one which changes colours based on one’s mood. The ashas are a bit like geishas but with great magical prowess. Some concepts of this world that I think readers would benefit from reading about now are the ashas and the heartsglass. There are multiple kingdoms, each with their own culture and customs, with some of them a subtle nod to places and cultures in own own world. The world she has created is complex and layered.
The book keeps moving between both timelines, with the older Tea commenting on the events in the life of the younger Tea, but we never see the timelines converge–we never see what led to her exile, and we must wait for the sequel to know that.įirst off, the thing that Rin Chupeco has done wonderfully here is the world-building. The rest of the book has to do with her training to be an asha, and how she uncovers a plot by the Faceless, the followers of The False Prince, to overthrow all the current rulers of their world. Luckily, before anyone can harm her, Lady Mykaela, the only other bone witch in the kingdom arives, and takes her and her undead brother-now Tea’s familiar, away to the capital, Ankyo, to train with other ashas in the House Valerian. This makes the people around her scared, because this means that she is a dark asha, a bone witch. Tea’s brother, Fox, is a soldier in the army, and when he is killed by a daeva (a monstrous creature that terrorizes people), Tea unwittingly resurrects him from the dead. As the conversation progresses, and she narrates her life story, the timeline moves to the past and we see a younger version of this same asha, Tea (pronounced as Tay-ah not Tee). She has been exiled to this remote and desolate beach. She tells him that she is an asha–a person who has the ability to draw runes, and a dark asha at that–she can raise the dead.
When it begins, the reader sees an unnamed Bard in conversation with a mysterious girl, on the shores of an ocean, as she orders a monster to die. So it’s okay, once in a while, to judge a book by the cover. I guessed it would be fantasy, and I expected to enjoy it. I’ll be honest, I requested the ARC of The Bone Witch, because I fell in love with the cover.
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