Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil - V.E. Schwab - ★★

AUTHOR: V.E. Schwab

GENRE: Fantasy

PUBLICATION DATE: June 10, 2025

RATING: 2 stars.

In a Nutshell: A multi-timeline vampire fantasy about needs, wants, and desires. Triple POV, but only one was interesting. Good prose, lacklustre plot, repetitive scenes. Mostly boring. Only the finale has a few thrills. This is an outlier opinion.

Plot Preview:

1532. Spain. Maria. A beautiful girl married to a viscount who views her only as a vessel to bring forth his future children. She longs for freedom.

1827. England. Charlotte. An idealistic girl who's sent away to her relatives in London to hide a clandestine affair. She longs for love.

2019. USA. Alice. A Scottish girl who joins college in Boston hoping for a fresh start and a clean break from the past. But one mistake imperils her plans. She longs for revenge.

How do the lives of these three girls intersect?

The story comes to us in their third-person perspectives spread across multiple countries and centuries.

In all honesty, had I realised that this was a vampire story, I wouldn't even have picked it up. But even if I give the book some leeway for having characters I don’t enjoy reading about, I still won't be able to give it a high rating.

This book has 535 pages. These are divided across the three characters, but not equally. Maria gets the most focus, with Charlotte and Alice possibly getting an equal share of the rest. Alice's perspective is immaterial to the narrative for the most part, though we can see its connection with another timeline. Charlotte's POV begins decently but after a point, it becomes boring.

This leaves us with Maria’s perspective, which has a fantastic start. I was so captivated by her arc that the other two characters’ drab perspectives left me wondering why they were even present in the story. (They are relevant, of course. But the connection comes out much later.) The history, the characters, and the story development in Maria’s initial arc was spot on. However, this stops once her vampire path begins. After this point, her track follows the same two (mostly unconnected) events: drink blood, feel lust. Repeated until the final section. This left me utterly bored.

No other character has that substantial a role to play in the overall book, even though a few of them have a strong presence for a few chapters. The male characters’ development is particularly lacking, with almost all of them sounding and acting the same, and not in a good way.

The story of the three girls spans multiple centuries, with each chapter clearly tagged with the year and location. I like the author's choice of appending each character's name with a certain date (Not going into spoilers.) It was an intriguing choice, and took me some time to figure out why that date was being mentioned. At the same time, we get the usual dose of feminine rage in all three timelines, which is highly unbelievable. No matter how advanced a woman’s thinking, a woman in the 16th century cannot spout the exact same thoughts as one in the 21st century.

That said, the difference in their time periods is a good way of seeing the changes in cultural and societal patterns. The subjugation of women and their spirits stays common to all paths, proving that women's rights have been crawling ahead only at snail speed. (And possibly, even regressing now in certain countries.)

The author's writing style is good. The prose is lyrical without being purple, and all the descriptions help us to visualise people and events well. Only at times does the description overpower the pacing. The steam content was too high for my preference; YMMV.

While I have a big problem with the repetition of the events and the minimal plot development for more than half of the book, I appreciate how each character has a distinct personality. This creates an interesting individuality in their response to events. At the same time, it is tough to believe that most of the interactions the girls have regardless of era are limited to other lesbians.

I can’t reveal more about the book because everything else would be a spoiler. Suffice it to say, the overly convenient plotting and the repetitiveness in the vampire lifestyle caused me to lose interest in the proceedings after a point. The finale redeemed the experience to some extent, but it was a case of ‘too little, too late’.

I am disappointed that my first VE Schwab book ended up like this. But what’s new? Almost every time I pick up a popular author, I end up disliking their works. 😒 Mine is anyway an outlier opinion, so please check other reviews as well before you take a call on this work.

Recommended to those who enjoy vampire fantasy novels with NA-level steam and feminine rage and character-oriented storylines and slow pacing. (I don’t mind the last two attributes, but the rest isn't my cup of tea.)