When the Bones Sing
Ginny Myers Sain
From New York Times bestselling author of Dark and Shallow Lies comes a new southern gothic supernatural thriller about a teen girl in a small Ozark town who can hear the bones of the dead. The past three years have been tough for Lucifer’s Creek, Arkansas, a small town quietly tucked away in the Ozark mountains. More than two dozen people have disappeared on the local hiking trails; there one moment, gone the next, not a trace left behind, until their buried bodies are discovered. 17-year-old Dovie doesn’t believe in magic even though she comes from a long line of women who can hear the bones of the dead sing, and for the past few years the bones have been crooning nonstop, calling out to Dovie to dig them up. Some of the old-timers believe that it’s the monstrous Ozarks howler snatching people off the Aux Arc Trail. Well Dovie doesn’t believe in the howler, and she doesn’t believe her best friend Lo when he tells her he is being haunted by dark shadows. All she believes in is her talent that guides the local sheriff to the bones when they begin their song, then reuniting the dead with their families to give them some peace. Lo doesn’t know peace, though. The shadows follow him everywhere. He soon learns they’re the murdered hikers and they want answers. But the truth of their deaths isn’t buried with their bones; it’s hidden somewhere deep in the hills. And Lo and Dovie must unearth it before anyone else is killed.
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** I was provided an electronic ARC from the publisher through NetGalley.** Ginny Myers Sain presents her newest YA thriller When the Bones Sing. Readers follow Dovie, a resident of the Ozarks who can feel the bones buried in the mountains. She helps the sheriff find them so that they can be laid to rest. A useful skill when hikers continuously go missing from the town, only to be found dead in the woods. Dovie's best friend Lo is haunted by the ghosts of the missing people and locals blame the legendary Ozark howler for the deaths. Despite her own gift, Dovie doesn't believe in magic or the supernatural. She does believe in truth, and is determined to find out why two dozen people have gone missing in the past couple years and why Lo can have no peace from their spirits. I had a difficult time with becoming invested in this story, and waited for the audiobook to come available to give this book the best possible chance to be liked. Narrator Amanda Stribling is from Tennessee and contributes a Southern accent that contributes a lot to the atmosphere of the book. This southern gothic supernatural thriller was very much on the nose. Readers had access to clues laid out throughout the story and could potentially figure out what was happening before Dovie. Dovie's refusal to believe in the supernatural despite her own very real generational gift came across as a bit absurd and detrimental to the process of finding out what was happening. The introduction of a pseudo-love triangle amidst the murders was absolutely not necessary and took away from the tension of the story. Despite my personal problems with some of the choices made, I think the target age demographic would not be as distracted by the things that stood out to me. Even with those things, the pacing of the novel was pretty steady with a constant drive forward toward the conclusion. I would recommend this one as having good entertainment value despite not doing anything particularly new for the genre and will be continuing to look into Sain's backlist.
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