Your rating:
Prepare for more spooky, swoony YA from BookTok star @Merrowchild! Charlie Frith and his new love, Sam, have just saved the dead from the living! Now it's time to focus on being a normal couple - if such a thing exists? But when a new threat lurks in the shadows, this time to the living, and all who Charlie and Sam hold near, they must put everything on the line - including their lives - to work out who is behind it. And even then, it may not be enough! Perfect for fans of Cemetery Boys, Becky Albertalli and V E Schwab Sixteen Souls was an instant YA bestseller and this is the second book in the series Dubbed by Book Tok as "Heartstopper with Ghosts" Praise for Sixteen Souls: "Delivers fun and frights in equal measure. A fantastically spooky, thrilling adventure!" - Kat Ellis, author of Wicked Little Deeds "Flawless twists, this book immediately pulled me in." - H.M Long, author of Hall of Smoke "A captivating take of loss, friendship and love that had me gripped from first to last." - Menna van Praag, author of The Sisters Grimm "Absolutely gripped." - Amy McCaw, author of Mina and the Undead "The writing is rich; the characters sharply drawn." - K.D Edwards, author of The Tarot Sequence Series "Sixteen Souls is a boundlessly clever, heartfelt queer take on the story of a sensitive young man who sees dead people. Talbot has crafted something chillingly delightful! Perfect for any ghoul-lover's shelf!" - Adam Sass, author of Surrender Your Sons and The 99 Boyfriends of Micah Summers "Deliciously dark" - Cynthia Murphy, author of Last One to Die, Win Lose Kill Die and The Midnight Game "A delectable mystery" - Dawn Kurtagich, author of The Dead House "An outstanding debut" - Bex Hogan, author of Isles of Storm and Sorrow series
No posts yet
Kick off the convo with a theory, question, musing, or update
Your rating:
Content Warnings: Death, Murder, Injury Detail, Gore, Body Horror, Grief, Homophobia, Parental Death. Representations: https://trello.com/c/rk7i9JDT/87-the-death-touched-of-york-2-twelve-bones-by-rosie-talbot Well this was a pretty good sequel! Unfortunately a lot of the plot threads/holes from the first book weren't fully solved in this one - but a lot of questions where answered! Set a few months after the ending events of book 1, Sam and Charlie finally get some time to be romantic.... Until even more ghosts want their help! Missing bones, strange occult goings-on and more! There's quite a lot that goes on here. Explanation and expansion of The Hand, grappling with the events of the first book still and especially expanding on the world and magic system! I think the issue the first book had where there's too many characters is still very much an issue here. Where characters where lost in the first book, they're very quickly just replaced in this book, with more characters thrown in on top. The character arc's and development was as good as the first book in my opinion, not overly fleshed out but satisfying enough that you can very easily tell there's a difference. Though the plot..... the plot is why it's 4 stars not 5. Minor spoilers for tropes used in the ending if you care for that but not about what actually happens. The plot up until the ending - and even the first part of the ending - is pretty standard to what the first book was like and quite enjoyable. The ending climax started and got real dark and tense and it was great....... and then the author pulled the "and now they're god" trope. It just feels a bit lazy, you wrote this ending, if it can't be solved within the confines of the established lore and boundaries then why have that be the ending? Judging by how fast this book released, I suspect there was heavy crunch involved in making it, but even then I'd kinda just prefer an ending that just ends with a "it's an impossible situation! Lets see how it ends in book 3" if you needed more time to work it out. I get why, and yes the solution is I presume what book 3 will be about, but it just came out of nowhere and just felt a bit rushed imo. Another thing that felt a bit rushed is the representations. There's a lot, if you look at my trello card linked at the top of this review you'll see there's a *lot* of labels. I think I got everything but I suspect I'm actually forgetting about some. There's a few that are kinda just "this character exists with this representation. Ok they're gone now". This happened at the end of book 1 with sign language, an incredibly fleeting moment during the ending that isn't continued even slightly into book 2. I was kinda really excited for another book with sign language representation :(