Charm is something of a witch, creating the various “women” in the brothel she runs. But she’s also a prisoner in her own home, under the control of the emperor, who is dying. He charges Charm with finding out which of his sons is responsible for his death and for determining who will be the heir.

This is quite a wonderful story supported by fascinating world-building, characters and plot. There are secrets and more secrets to be uncovered and each of the women made by Charm has a part to play in how it all plays out. It’s actually a lot to take in and I feel I will have to reread this one day to fully appreciate the way the book has been written.

Overall I give this 4 stars and would be quite interested in reading further work by the writer. I would like to thank NetGalley and MacMillan Tor/Forge for giving this advanced reader copy. I have written this review voluntarily.

Review goes live on LairofBooks on 5/14/2022 at 8am EST

CAWPILE RATING:
Characters: 10/10   Atmosphere: 7/10  Writing Style: 7/10  Plot: 5/10  Intrigue: 7/10  Logic/Relationships: 7/10  Enjoyment: 7/10

Rating: 50/7.1 =  ☆☆ 4 Stars☆☆╮

☆☆ “𝐌𝐞𝐧 𝐝𝐢𝐝 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐫 𝐢𝐧 𝐚 𝐰𝐨𝐦𝐚𝐧. 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐲 𝐥𝐚𝐛𝐞𝐥𝐞𝐝 𝐢𝐭 𝐰𝐞𝐚𝐤𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬.” ☆☆╮

The Bone Orchard is one of those books you don't really forget reading, that is to say it is quite an experience. I'll be honest and say that I spent just about half of this book mildly confused but highly intrigued to see it through to the end. It’s now been a week since finishing it and the characters live rent free in my mind. This story follows Charm who is a Madam and sex worker herself. She comes from Inshil, a land of necromancers that was conquered and their people mentally enslaved. Charm is under the Emperor’s control and runs the house many influential men visit for pleasures. The Bone Orchard is where she harvests bones, those of her children aka her girls: Justice, Pain, Shame, Pride, and Desire. The girls aren’t real but they work at the house nonetheless and how they came about is the mystery at the core of this story. The Emperor has been poisoned and on his deathbed he has tasked Charm with finding his killer in exchange for her freedom. This is a character driven slower paced story with some brutally tough scenes to navigate. There’s on page assault which triggers discussion on how sex workers are treated and the dangers they face daily. There are quite a lot of triggers tbh, this one gets dark rather quickly as their trauma is unearthed. As confused as I was for a good portion of this story, it all comes together and makes sense mid-way. I found myself genuinely invested in some of the girls and very curious about our MC Charm and “The Lady” who lives in her head. I love when I discover there’s so much more to a book I’m reading than the fantasy aspects. There’s value in this story, I felt the author handled sex work itself very well even if it was difficult to read some of the more violent scenes. I'm the type of reader who doesn't mind being taken on a ride where I'm not quite sure what's going on lol, I know this won't be the case for everyone. The Bone Orchard will have to find it's audience, I'm pretty confident reader will REALLY enjoy the pay-off in this story! also very curious to read more from this author 🖤

CW: Assault, violence, pedophilia, rape, death of a child, murder

A strange, hypnotic, magical and wonderful read. I have never read something so inmersing as this book. It is written with expertise, the characters have layers upon layers of deepness, and the plot, eventhough not a very original one, fits perfectly the tone. I would recommend this book for fans of Seanan McGuire or Tim Burton movies. Absolutely beautiful.

I wanted to like this book so bad, because first off that cover is gorgeous!! But sadly it fell flat for me. I definitely respect the amount of work that went into this book, but this felt like a book full of non-sequitors. The political intrigue really didn't interest me, especially when the moves made by the characters really made no sense. Maybe I'm just stupid, who knows.

Get ready for a cruel dark world of abnegation and revenge, featuring a woman who struggles to achieve psychic integration after a succession of betrayals. Like a Westworld written by Edgar Allen Poe, Bone Orchard (Tor Books, 2022) comes with its own charming brothel owner, whose name actually is Charm.

Charm’s free will is limited by an implant, and her memory damaged. Her dying lover/captor, the old Emperor, assigns her two final tasks which she must complete to win her freedom. She must punish his poisoner and find a worthy person—not one of his sons—to serve as the next emperor.

Charm’s girls at the brothel are also her helpmates. They were grown in vats from assemblages of bones. That doesn’t mean they don’t have feelings, though. Like Charm, they are named after emotions. Pride mostly stands behind the reservation desk, looking cool and composed, while Shame is damaged early on in the game by one of the Emperor’s sons, the cruel Prince Phelan. And Pain—well, she has an especially hard time of it. Her role is to accept the pain of others, leaving them relieved of discomfort.

Behind all those linked girls lurks the spirit of a mysterious and gentle woman, the architect of their lives, referred to as the Lady, who shares Charm’s body with her. The Lady must be shielded from the terrible things that happen, but occasionally she comes out of the shadowy recesses of their shared consciousness to mend her creations.

This is just the opening set up of this complex and original novel, that continues to introduce flawed conniving characters to create a chessboard of moves and countermoves.

If you're looking for a novel that is everything and nothing like what you'd expect, consider trying The Bone Orchard by Sara A. Mueller. I went into this book with a lot of assumptions – some of them were accurate, but just as many were not.

Charm knows what it is like to be alone, even when surrounded by people. She's a necromancer trapped and imprisoned within the Orchard House. She runs this house and the people inside. These very people have been made again and again from the scraps of herself that Charm could spare.

Her whole life is about to be thrown into chaos as the Emperor calls her to his death bed. He has one final charge for Charm: discover which of his sons is the killer, and ensure they inherit the throne when he is gone.

“Sorry, Mistress, but I’m not much interested in ghosts. I have enough of my own.”

I knew going into it that The Bone Orchard would be an intense read. The title, cover, and premise all promise that much. Yet I was still unprepared for the depth revealed to me as I read on.

To be clear, I don't think The Bone Orchard is a book for everyone. It has a decent list of TWs (sexual assault, domestic violence, suicide), but it's more than that. Not once does The Bone Orchard shy away from heavy discussions and the emotional toll they may wreck. That's totally fine (great even!), but I think readers should know this going into it.

On the one hand, I enjoyed The Bone Orchard. On the other hand, there were times when it hurt my soul. Not because it was poorly written or anything like that, but because it hits pretty hard. Charm's story is...a lot. And that's before taking the other characters into account (I'm trying to be vague to avoid spoilers).

I do love how strong and determined Charm is. I will never get tired of this style of the protagonist and honestly think we could do with more of them out in the world. Beyond that, I feel like anything else I can say about Charm would once again bring us back into spoiler territory.

I will say that I think this is a book that most readers will love or struggle to finish. Personally, there were times when I needed to take a break from The Bone Orchard. However, I can easily see those breaks turning into something more permanent for other readers. It's definitely going to depend on your reading style here.

Brought to you by OBS reviewer Omar

The Bone Orchard is set in a world where psychics, empaths, and other humans with strange abilities live. It’s a strange world where if there is an emotion or a feeling that is too strong, you can push it out of your mind and make it live in an artificial body next to you. This is the story of Charm, the owner of the Orchard House, a house for gentlemen to eat, drink, play cards, and have a good time. The woman that serves the rich men of Borengaurd with her other selves who represent a part of her that she doesn’t want to feel.

After almost fifty years of being ageless and living in Orchard House, the Emperor who took her from her homeland and who she came to love, dies. With the Mindlock implanted in her head, he orders her to find his killer and to kill any of his sons that take the throne, but still needs to put a person that will take care of the realm; if she does all this, she will be free to leave.

With her freedom dangling in front of her, Charm will do anything she can to complete the task given to her, but the emperor’s sons are evil, and they will kill each other and anyone who gets in the way of the throne.

Some books catch the reader’s attention through the covers, others with the summary of the story, that is how I decided to read the Bone Orchard. The summary caught my attention from the beginning and the idea of characters harvesting from a bone tree has been the most interesting and disturbing storyline I have read this year, but once I started reading, it was so much more.

I liked that the girls are somewhat copies of Charm and she does harvest the skeleton’s parts from the bone trees in her garden. Once she has a full body, the Lady of the Orchard house puts them in a special tank to grow a body around them. This storyline was so fascinating, the special abilities that Charm has to do this have to keep her company over the last Fifty years that she has lived in that house.

While Charm is the main character of the book, Pain, Pride, Desire, Justice, and Shame are their own persona. They embody that emotion or facet of Charm, and she doesn’t feel it if they exist outside her. All of them have a purpose and over time have become their own self. Pain became my favorite since the beginning as she was able to be our eyes outside the Orchard house and gather information.

This story is mainly a fantasy genre but the storyline of who killed the Emperor was a fun tread to follow and try to find out who did it. But most of all the idea of being free impulse Charm to do everything she could to find the killer, she might look heartless and cruel to others, but her close friends and clients could see she was playing a dangerous game.

The Bone Orchard is full of interesting characters apart from the inhabitants of the Orchard house, Hyacinth the seamstress that also smuggles contraband goods, Captain Oram the Captain of the psychic enforcement guards, and the gentlemen of the parliament who are Charm’s friends.

I always like stories that have characters with different abilities and this book has many. Some are normal in the realm of psychic powers, and others are strange and mystical.

I recommend definitely the Bone Orchard. It was a fascinating and entertaining story about this mystical land where many tragic things happened, but a woman will do all she can to get her freedom.

Every once in a while I feel the need to branch out and try some books outside of my comfort zone. Sometimes it works and sometimes I'm confronted with the limits of how far from that comfort I'm willing to go. Speculative fiction and I have a rocky history but I keep trying in hopes that someday I'll find something that I can shout about from the rooftops with everyone else. The Bone Orchard was unfortunately another failed attempt, but I do so appreciate the writing talents of this debut author. This is definitely a situation of "It's not you, it's me."

I received an ARC from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I wanted to love this book. It's gorgeous (I mean, look at that Stunning cover) and I'm a Huge sucker for high stakes politics and necromantic elements in fantasy novels. Reading the description for this book, I was beyond sold.

I was super intrigued with the bone orchard itself, and the bone ghosts that Charm has created. The concept was original and inventive. The shifting loyalty lines and power struggles between Charm, the Lady, and the ghosts as they all wrestled within each other's influences was a dynamic that I enjoyed a fair bit. The concept of essentially exorcising certain character traits and memories into secondary bodies was SO metal. At a conceptual level, I enjoyed the promise of this book.

My problem with the novel is that I just didn't understand most of it. I didn't understand the world building, I'm not entirely sure how the political system worked, the magic never quite felt clear, and I couldn't nail all the character relationships down. The majority of the male characters could be boiled down into the same evil misogynistic stereotype, and when angered they all tended to resort to the same carbon copy hurled insults. Similarly, the plot lines surrounding the townspeople/peasantry/Firedrinkers left me confused as I could never tell where any of them stood, what they were fighting for, and why they all seemed to be treated as monoliths. Most of the darker elements of the story happened off page or were described in conversation to characters, diminishing the impact that they could have had on the characters, plot, and audience. Conversations between characters felt clumsy and heavy handed as they contained every single piece of critical information meant to carry the story forward with little finesse. Overall, I had a hard time connecting to the characters and the world.

The Bone Orchard reads like a debut. Mueller's concepts were strong and I'd be interested to read her future projects, but this book just ended up leaving me confused and rather disappointed with the pulled punches and neat bow of an ending from the darker fantasy novel she promised.

dnf @ 17%

this just isn’t working for me. i requested it based on a very compelling blurb, but i found the worldbuilding very confusing and i was lost the entire time. i love fantasy, but so much of fantasy is dependent upon creating worlds we’re intrigued by and invested in. that was really lacking here, which is why i’m dnf’ing at this point instead of reading further.

Charm is a bone witch, a prisoner, and a whore. Alongside the boneghosts that she grew in her laboratory, she runs a brothel at Orchard House. When her keeper the old emperor lies dying, poisoned, he charges her with safeguarding the empire and finding out which of his sons was his killer.

Firstly, that cover is utterly beautiful.

Now that this important matter is acknowledged, let us go on into the story. I saw a lot of complaints that it was difficult to understand, for the author plunges us straight into the plot and leaves it to the reader to figure out how to navigate this new world. However, I thought the world-building was well done and understanding unfolded quickly enough – you only need to pay close attention.

The characters are each distinct and well-realized, and I enjoyed the complex relationships between Charm and each of her parts. The boneghosts embody her cast-off split personalities, and so the interactions between them provides a fascinating commentary on trauma and identity. I also liked all the politicking and Charm’s machinations to keep herself and the others afloat amid all the upheaval . You well know I am a sucker for political intrigue, and The Bone Orchard explores how women can manage it in a society that does not give them much power through characters like Charm, Pain, and Ylsbeth.

However, I found the piecemeal delivery of Charm’s backstory somewhat unsatisfying – there are a lot of gaps left in it still, though I think that was an intentional choice on the author’s part. A plot twist was telegraphed to the point that I did not realize it was meant to be a plot twist, though another related to it did catch me off guard. Finally, my only major criticism, I thought the climax got somewhat rushed after the leisurely pace of the story, so that I did not realize we had come to the end until we had.

Overall, a solid debut, and I will definitely be keeping an eye out for future work by this author.

It took me a while to get into this book. The action takes a long time to start as Charm is slowly laying her plan. Charm and her bone ghosts are a difficult cast of characters to get used to, Their relationship to each other is not very clear at the beginning which can make the book daunting to readers.

What really got me hooked on the story was the introduction of some of the amazing side characters. I was pleasantly surprised by how detailed the side characters were. Captain Oram and Major Narthair were my favorites. Once I got about 30% of the way through I was fully invested.

The Bone Orchard is one of the most unique books I have ever read. Though all of the unsolved mysteries can be overwhelming at first, the payoff at the end is incredible. At no point did I have any of the mysteries fully solved but there were enough hints to keep me theorizing. Charm's character really grew on me throughout the book. She is a fascinating exploration of a woman trying to navigate a man's world. Every character in this book is morally grey and I love it! The chapters were also really short which keep me engaged the whole time.

Thank you to Netgalley for this advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.
The Bone Orchard follows Charm, who is the mistress of Orchard House. We follow as politics are revealed and we get to know the characters. I am sorry to say that I don’t think I enjoyed this book very much. I was confused pretty much the whole time. I could follow along with some of the plotlines and whatnot. But by the time I finished the book, I still had questions that hadn’t been answered.
I do think that this was a me thing and not the fault of the book. I think maybe I’m just not smart enough for this book or maybe I just didn’t read it with enough focus but I feel like I completely missed something.
Overall, I probably wouldn’t recommend this one, but I’d like to see what others thought of this one.

The Bone Orchard is adult fantasy at its best: dark, disturbing, and romantic, with intriguing characters and enough political machinations to keep one guessing to the end. It’s also a story of survival and dealing with trauma so severe that the only way to handle it is to shatter one’s mind to several independent personas.

Charm runs the most popular brothel in Borenguard, with the Emperor of Boren himself as her client. But she is the Emperor’s prisoner, has been for decades, thanks to pills that keep her and the Emperor’s family eternally young. He controls her with a mindlock that is used for keeping those with psychic abilities in rein and from going mad.

But she has a way around the control. She has shattered her mind into separate personas, each with a living body of flesh she calls bone ghosts, copies of her that don’t need sustenance. Shame, Justice, Desire, Pride, and Pain each hold a facet of her to keep the traumatic memories of her past from overwhelming her. Their bodies are unique creations of Lady, with whom Charm shares her mind, but who is mostly kept sleeping because of her delicate nature.

Then the Emperor summons Charm to his deathbed and gives her one last command: find out who murdered him and keep his sons from inheriting the throne. The command plunges her in the middle of political machinations and on a road that will either destroy her mind for good—or heal it.

This was an absolutely brilliant book. Slow-paced, but constantly moving ahead. Charm doesn’t have an easy time figuring out what happened to the Emperor and her task is made even more difficult when the Lady starts to fight over the control of their shared mind. The bone ghosts, who serve the customers at her brothel, begin to show independent streaks too.

There are three point of view characters, Charm, Lady, and Pain who has a unique position in the brothel as the only person who can leave the grounds. Despite being facets of the same mind, they are different persons and have unique voices. Pain’s path to independence and her slow-burning romance acted as a counter to Charm’s cold determination to find out the killer and earn her freedom, and Lady’s persistent clinging to her innocence.

Little by little, we learn about the events that led to Charm’s mind shattering and how it played to current political turmoil. And while none of the emperor’s sons are fit to rule, there might be other candidates for the throne after all. This was a stand-alone book, but I would love to return to its world and characters.

The Bone Orchard centers on Charm, a witch, madam, and beloved mistress to the Emperor of Borengard, a role of which she is discharged upon his untimely passing. On his death bed, the Emperor relays to Charm his steadfast belief that one of his four sons has poisoned him for his throne and charges her with determining which of them is responsible, a task she is intent on fulfilling by duty and personal vendetta. In doing so she will earn her freedom at last, but uncovering secrets of the royal court will prove difficult for someone of her station. Despite the disadvantages of her social position, Charm is nothing if not resourceful, and with the help of her boneghosts and a handful of unlikely allies, Charm will do everything in her power to ensure justice is rendered.

The Bone Orchard is the kind of novel I really wish I loved wholeheartedly. On the surface it checks a lot of boxes – it’s well written, there’s a lot of world-building, the story is patently unique – but I ultimately felt like there was just too much going on. Quite immediately I felt bombarded by the roster of characters – a lot of royals, lords, majors, the Lowtowners, several tradespeople, and then of course the boneghosts. I think the author did an exceptional job of fleshing out various characters, both prominent and secondary (Charm, Anders, Major Nathair and Hyacinth are some of my personal favourites), but I think the sheer volume of personalities being juggled inherently diluted my enjoyment and recognition of many characters in the novel. There were also a number of instances throughout where geographical, historical and/or political details were getting lost on me, either because I wasn’t paying close enough attention or because the framework to help me understand wasn’t there in the first place.

Despite some pacing issues I had with this book, I do appreciate the author’s attentions to the world-building aspect of this novel and felt very interested in little details that she hinted towards. If Mueller was so inclined, I could see an audience for a prequel set in Inshil exploring the pre-mindlock psychic society before Charm/Lady came to Borengard.

All in all, the author did a great job with constructing a detailed and well-researched narrative and I expect exceptionally attentive readers will thoroughly enjoy this novel.

Thanks to Macmillan Tor-Forge and NetGalley for this one-of-a-kind read!

The Bone Orchard is slow starting. I really thought I might DNF it but I’m glad I didn’t. It picked up and just TOOK OFF around chapter 10.

Definitely old gothic who-dun-it type of book which is 🤌🏻 💋 100% kept my brain going throughout the story.

The self discovery in this book is amazing! You know that I never like to spoil anything so I won’t get into specific detail… HOWEVER… I can relate to Charm in multiple ways; especially at the end ♥️

Non-binary representation 👌🏻

Plot twist 😶

This was a magnificent story.
Thank you @sara_a_mueller @netgalley @torbooks for providing me with an advance copy. TBO is out now.

I’ve been putting off writing this review. Not because I didn’t like the book. Quite the contrary. I loved this book so much I have trouble articulating it. Why does it seem like the ones we like most are hardest to review? At least that’s the way it is for me.

I’m not one of for books with necromancy as much, usually because they tend to be of the gritty or melodramatic variety, but I simply couldn’t resist that beautiful cover and so I requested it. I am so glad I did. The author crafts her story with such lovely language and imagery. It is a very well written book and I couldn’t put it down. It is one of my first 5-star reads of the year. I’m guessing I will be revisiting it again very soon.

Oh this book, these characters and this story. It is ostensibly a mystery, but to me the story is so much more than that. If anything, while I really did want to know who actually was behind the assassination … it was the women of Charm’s house and their relationships with one another that held the most fascination for me. Each of them a facet of a woman who is trying her best to survive after experiencing the colonization of her homeland. They suffer from severe PTSD, and how they cope with it engenders in the reader such sadness, but also admiration. Courage and resilience abounds.

This is not one to miss. I am looking forward to reading it again in the near future, and will be watching out for whatever this author comes up with yet. Did I mention it’s a debut novel? I’m sure there are good things to come from Ms. Mueller in future.

I definitely wanted more of the gruesome bits: namely the construction of bone ghosts, the manufacturing of rejuve, the messiness of adapting to a mind lock, etc. And I feel like our big reveals and other revelations all tumbled out at once rather than appearing in pieces throughout the story.

However, Charm, Pain, and The Lady serve as such brilliant foils for each other, and the play of their different characters as they all strive for their goals was a delightful dance of each doing what they believed was right - in ways that the others might not approve. It was also very clever to give each of these three different levels of access to knowledge, people, and the world outside the house. I think with a little bit more time exploring through Pain's perspective, we could have gotten a much richer view of the larger world.

Also, we love a genderfluid side character who gets asked for their pronouns (and then has those pronouns respected) even in this Victorian-esque setting. Plus they were a dynamic and interesting character - who was less present than I would have liked but it fit the boundaries of the story.

There are things I absolutely loved about this work. The worldbuilding is top-notch, and I really enjoyed how original and fresh the story feels. However, the pacing was all over the place, and I didn't feel like the ending wrapped up all the threads. There was just a sense that this book needed a few more rounds of editing to really shine because there is so much good lying under the OK.

This book is both nothing like I thought it would be and, surprisingly, everything I didn’t know I wanted or needed.

It’s not a perfect book: the overarching plot line stumbles at times (as if the author has gone off on a bit of a tangent and then remembers there’s a whole other aspect of this book to write), and the large cast of secondary and tertiary characters can get a bit mixed up at times, sometimes disappearing and reappearing in a manner that can come across as all-to-convenient.

What I think is that there are two wholly different books inside this one book, and it was like keeping plates spinning without dropping them to get through this entire book without china crashing everywhere. There’s an intriguing political sci-fi/fantasy mystery novel involving a dying Emperor who, in the minutes before his death, charges his favorite mistress with solving his murder and ensuring none of his sons stay on the throne (or even stay alive); and then there’s a dramatic sci-fi/fantasy novel exploring being a kidnapped, violated, and imprisoned woman held in an opulent, gilded cage and left to her own devices and means to help stay alive in spite of a horrific case of post-traumatic stress disorder and how she compartmentalizes her captive and abusive life in order to survive.

Therein lies the problem: this could be two whole books all on their own and sometimes it feels like one whole storyline eclipses the other for a small amount of time, which makes for a disjointed story, when taken in as a whole.

The thing is: both of these storylines are so intensely interesting I couldn’t find it in myself to totally dislike it or stop reading. If Mueller had tried to explain the metaphysical/fantastical aspects of this novel in more depth I’m sure this would be a large mess, so I’m actually glad (for once) that the “magic system” wasn’t explored in depth. We knew what we needed to know, and that’s not what the story was about anyway, so it only becomes something to be acknowledged every now and again.

The protagonist… well, talking about her would be a spoiler-and-a-half. But I loved her. I love stories where a woman (or women) are so easily underestimated or easily dismissed they end up holding all the cards. But I’m a mad woman who thrives on chaos. Call this book what you want, but it was my kind of jam.

Thanks to NetGalley, MacMillan Tor/Forge, and Tor Books for early access to this title in exchange for a fair and honest review.