Wyatt Westlock must return to the farmhouse she has just inherited; the very same farmhouse her mother ran from, together with Wyatt, five years ago and never returned to. She has one plan: burn it all to the ground. But when she finds a childhood friend, Peter, chained up in the basement and left for dead, she finds that she has more questions and puts off her acts of arson.

Your Blood, My Bones haunts me to my core. I finished it twelve hours ago and I cannot stop thinking about it. Andrew has weaved a story of heartbreak, horror, fantasy and romance and used it to break my own heart in two.

You follow along with Wyatt, who is discovering the mystery of Willow Heath and of Peter, the boy who has died over a hundred times but is still standing before her, and his quest to kill her. When their former friend James shows up, Peter is wary but Wyatt is glad to have a voice of reason. And boy, how does that spiral out of control. I loved seeing the relationship between these characters and their struggles to come to terms with what they are now, compared with how they saw each other five years prior.

When I say I cried at the end of this one, I bawled. It was gut-wrenching and my standards for stories have risen incredibly after this one. The story was gorgeous, the characters are complex and nuanced, and the good slow burn romance is something that I yearn for in every story.

As I have come to love, Kelly Andrew's writing is absolutely beautiful and I love her story telling. I fell in love with her writing during The Whispering Dark, and this has increased it tenfold. She is one of my newest auto buy authors.

🍃 cults
🍃 body horror
🍃 friends to enemies to ???
🍃 “went into the woods and came back wrong”
🍃 three former friends trapped in an old farmhouse
🍃 gothic horror vibes

Thank you to Hachette Australia & Gollancz for an e-arc of this one, all opinions are my own.

4.5
When Wyatt Westlock returns to her family farm, she intends to burn it to the ground. She didn't expect to find Peter, her childhood friend, chained up in the basement. What follows is a haunting journey through memories of sun-soaked summers and childhood daydreams while nightmarish beasts stream out of the forest, desperate for a way through the wards and into the world.
Kelly Andrew has perfected the voice for gothic fantasy. The prose is hauntingly beautiful, even when Andrew describes something that fills the reader with dread. I didn't expect to find this book so captivating or so unsettling. The sense of place is immaculate, and the feeling of returning to childhood friends and finding everything different than how we remembered it was a surprising gut-punch.
The only thing keeping this from being 5-stars for me was the stakes. While they are present throughout the book, I didn't feel much escalation through the midpoint. The challenges Wyatt faced were repetitions of what we'd already seen, with perhaps a slight uptick in danger as the wards began to fail, but this was enough to make these moments feel distinct. Andrew's prose carried the novel and the expertly crafted character relationships kept me going where the external stakes started to flag.
Overall, I adored this book and will be raving about it for months to come. I might get myself a physical copy when it comes out! If you're a fan of A Study in Drowning, gothic fantasy and fantasy-horror, this will be right up your alley.
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the e-arc.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ stars
No spice

“He tasted like a tragedy. An end, before they’d even begun.”

“He didn’t hate her. He loved her so much that it was like holding his heart outside of his body.”

A gritty, gory, complex, and utterly heart-wrenching gothic fantasy that will have your hackles raised and leave your soul aching by the end.

Kelly Andrew just ripped my heart out of my chest and buried it in a grove six feet under. I need to sit in a dark room and contemplate my life for a while, because I feel absolutely ruined by this book.

How can I begin to explain how heartbroken I am for every one of these characters?! I hope that ending was left open to interpretation the way I think it was. I’m choosing to live in denial even if it wasn’t.

I don’t think I’ve read anything quite like this book before, certainly not something that encapsulates so wonderfully that childhood adventure-time nostalgia, but wrapped in a dark twisted fantasy that rots from the inside out. I’m not sure how it managed to do both these things all at once but it just made so much sense.

The main trio of characters were perfect, I can close my eyes and picture them so vividly - how they smile, how they talk, and how they exist in space. The writing in this book and the descriptive language used was so beautiful, mixed with the cottage core vibes I was transported into a different universe. It was captured so perfectly I could feel the foliage creeping off the pages.

At times, the pace was slow and some plot points didn’t seem critical to the storyline. Some of the more action-heavy scenes were harder to decipher exactly what was happening, when the descriptive prose got in the way of plot clarity. I often had to re-read pages to figure out what had happened. This is really a minor point, and didn’t take away from the reading experience too much.

I read this not realising it was set in the same world as her other book, The Whispering Dark, with some character cameos. You definitely don’t need to have read that book to enjoy this one. A fantastic read all round!

Tropes:
🕷️Star-crossed friends to enemies to lovers
🕸️Forced Proximity
🕷️Cottage Core
🕸️Dark Gothic Fantasy
🕷️Slow burn
🕸️Cults & Ritual Sacrifice
🕷️Multi POV

I had high expectations for this novel because Kelly Andrews' last book (The Whispering Dark) was a five star read for me. I didn't like it as much as I expected to, though it was still enjoyable.

I like the horror aspect to this book, though I thought the plot and character building suffered in exchange for the gothic vibe-building. I would have loved to know why the Whitlock family were magic, why Wyatt can both decay and grow things, where the split between worlds came from, etc. The pacing also seemed off, with some sections feeling very slow, and some new characters being introduced and then disappearing incredibly quickly. I did like the slightly obsessive nature of the friendship between the three main characters - I love a good love/hate/obsession arc in books.

The writing was a difficult one for me - the prose was beautiful, lyrical and immersive, but I think it was definitely too heavy handed at times: it felt like swimming through sludge when I just wanted some sharp clean prose to clear the waters. I would have preferred a bit more plot and a bit less vibes.

Overall this book was pretty good though, and I don't regret reading it.

Your Blood, My bones is a haunting story that will keep you gripped and guessing the entire time.

The writing style is poetic and melancholic, it is so easy to get lost in the words, but as you get deeper into the story the whimsicalness of the writing isn’t enough to stop the heart wrenching happens from kicking your heart through your chest. It is nothing like anything I have read before, I was enthralled and terrified all at the same time.

The story of these three childhood best friends is loaded with secrets and enough pain that you’re just hoping they finally have a soft, safe place to land at the end of it all. Wyatt, Peter and James are complex characters, all with a past too heavy to carry around alone. Their history and understanding of each other is rich an intricately crafted, which only works to highlight the depth of love they have for each other.

This book will rattle your bones in a way nothing has before.

Perhaps add it to the tbr if you enjoy:

- Witchy vibes
- Complex relationships
- Slowburn
- Deep and artfully expressed emotions (parts of this felt like poetry)
- Unreliable characters
- Horror/mystery
- Dark backstories

4.75/5

I finished this book a few days ago and I waited before writing this review, thinking it would help me process everything and be able to put my thoughts into something coherent. Well, that hasn't happened, so here I am, still heart-broken after reading the ending of this book, WHICH I DID NOT SEE COMING AT ALL. That's a good thing, if you were wondering. I love not being able to predict something, especially when all the clues are there, laid out for me, and I still refuse to see them. And I love books that give me emotions, even though I think I will never recover from this.

Getting to know the characters was a journey I loved taking - as well as slowly discovering what happened in the past to make everyone the way they were now. It was like peeling away layers, very slowly, every time revealing small cuts and wounds that hadn't yet healed.

And the writing is so beautiful that it will make you lose yourself in the book completely, making you want to spend all your time with the characters, following them in their journey, while you worry because they act irresponsibly and because you know something terrible is going to happen to them, even if they don't realise it yet.

But really, be prepared, because the ending WILL DESTROY YOU (in a bad way, but also kind of in a good way?).

Thank you Netgalley and Hachette Australia & New Zealand for the ARC

Three childhood friends will need to make the ultimate sacrifice. Wyatt never wanted to come back home as she lost two friends that were important to her. She can’t believe that Peter is hanging up downstairs. And that her father did this to him. She is about to learn the truth about Peter & the forest. But will Wyatt be strong enough to help Peter with his plan? Jamie never wanted to come back this way he hopes that his two friends can save him for the evil that has him. Will they be able to end this nightmare but at what cost to themselves.
A great read. Took me awhile to get into it but once I became engrossed in the story I couldn’t stop reading. Great characters. Wyatt is stronger than she thinks & she will have to let go. Peter just wants it all to end he is tired now. Jamie has always be the easy one that had to lie to keep his friends safe.
Thank you Netgalley & the publisher for the copy. This is my voluntary review

Okay WOW this book. Pitching it as a slow burn rivals to lovers YA romance doesn't quite capture the mild horror, fantasy and gothic element and themes in it.

Your Blood, My Bones is written in a hauntingly captivating way. Kelly Andrew has an ability to write beautiful prose in a manner I haven't come across before.

The emotional rollercoaster of this book was next level - It ripped out my heart and stomped on it. I was actually crying in parts of it, and then laughing at one liners in other parts.

This book does have a fairly extensive list of potential triggers though, I recommend checking those out first - One that stood out to me was the animal deaths, which always puts me a bit offside.

Overall an incredible book, with an ending that was a little difficult to swallow.

Big thank you to the publishers and Netgalley for allowing me to read an eARC of this one!

Wyatt Westlock has one plan for the house she’s just inherited, and that’s to burn it to the ground. But during her final walkthrough of her childhood home, she makes a shocking discovery in the basement. Peter, a boy she once considered a close friend, strung up in chains and left for dead. Unbeknownst to Wyatt, Peter has suffered hundreds of ritualistic deaths in her home. Partly immortal, Peter never remains dead for long, but he’s not really alive either.

Not while he’s bound to the house, locked in a cycle of grisly deaths and painful rebirths. There’s only one way for him to be free and that’s for Wyatt Westlock ti die. With her parents gone, the spells protecting the property have begun to unravel, and dark, ancient forces gather in the nearby forest. Working together is the only way to repairs the wards and harness her volatile magic. Bit how can she trust someone who’s sworn an oath to destroy her?

When the past turns up to haunt them in the most unexpected way, they are forced to rely on one another to serves, or else be each others downfall. How does one learn to trust someone who’s sworn to kill them? They’ll go to any lengths to hide the darkest parts of themselves and learn that people who love those parts most of all could become your darkest enemy. A twisted romance that bleeds seductively through the pages with fierce loyalty to the characters, and the story. There is something beautifully gruesome about this novel that will have any horror reader on the edge of their seat.

𝘛𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘬 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘵𝘰 𝘏𝘢𝘤𝘩𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘦 𝘈𝘶𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘢 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘢𝘯 𝘢𝘥𝘷𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘥 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘦𝘳 𝘤𝘰𝘱𝘺 𝘷𝘪𝘢 𝘕𝘦𝘵𝘎𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘠𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘉𝘭𝘰𝘰𝘥, 𝘔𝘺 𝘉𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘴 𝘣𝘺 𝘒𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘈𝘯𝘥𝘳𝘦𝘸𝘴

Your Blood my Bones

⭐️ 4/5

Thanks Netgalley and Hachette Australia for the Advanced Reader Copy

This book will definitely be my gateway to horror romance books and I am here for it.

The story is about Wyatt who returns to her childhood home to burn it down after her father passing only to discover the hornets nest of secrets and mind bending revelations. It is a YA contemporary fantasy horror and I was here for it.

Once again Kelly Andrew knows how to make you feel all the feels with a very beautiful descriptive and atmospheric writing. The pacing goes from very fast to slow, to fast again, all made me feel very aware, yet very uncomfortable reading it, which elevated the experience.

Feeling the character’s loneliness, emptiness, hollowness but also hopelessness, but yet every chapter will gives you a sparkle of hope that everything will be alright. The characters are what we call loyal soulmates from the moment they meet when they are kids. Its always been the 3 of them… The way their love for each other was described, so raw and so beautiful.

Absolutely loved this book, I am empty and heartbroken but also so intensely happy that this book made me feel so much. This is why I read, to feel all the feels and to transport into another world and in another life.

⚫️ Spooky house + magic woods
⚫️ A Cult + ritualistic sacrifice
⚫️ Horror vibes
⚫️ Blood, so much gory stuff
⚫️ Witches with elemental powers and beyond

Loved the book! Can’t wait till it comes out so I can buy a copy for my trophy shelf.

Tropes: Friends-to-enemies-to-lovers, Haunted Woods, Blood and Bone Sacrifices

After receiving the sudden news of her father's passing, Wyatt Westlock inherits a farmhouse that she quickly decides to burn down. During her final visit to the place where she spent her childhood summers, she is shocked to discover Peter, her long-lost best friend and secret love, imprisoned in the basement. Wyatt learns that Peter is immortal and has endured countless ritualistic deaths on the property. He reveals that to break free from the cycle, he must end the Westlock lineage by killing Wyatt. With the return of James, the final member of the trio, they battle against ancient evil forces surrounding the property as the protective barriers weaken. Wyatt realizes she must rely on Peter to understand and control her own powerful magic to save their world from the impending catastrophe.

Despite my personal rating, I thoroughly enjoyed this book and recommend it, especially for fans of Paranormal, Horror, and Slow-Burn Romances. "Your Blood, My Bones" is a captivating read that immerses readers in a world with minimal effort. At its core, the story focuses on the enduring friendship among three individuals, navigating secrets, lies, trauma, and death, weaving a beautiful tale. The strong bonds between the characters kept me engaged throughout, and the author's stunning descriptive writing style made the experience incredibly enjoyable! Andrews' skillful descriptions have prompted me to explore her other works.

One aspect that didn't resonate with me was Wyatt's character development in the initial 40% of the book, where she made questionable decisions without substantial rationale. This inconsistency affected the narrative, especially considering her transformation into a formidable force by the end. While Wyatt's character evolves significantly in the latter part of the book, her earlier choices detracted from the overall experience. However, Peter and James' characters were a highlight, and I wished for more depth in exploring Peter's past lives. The trio's dynamic was portrayed excellently, showcasing a profound bond among the characters.

This book offers a bittersweet conclusion that may evoke sadness in MANY readers, despite a semblance of a happy ending. While I personally didn't shed tears, the emotional impact of the final chapters is palpable and I suspect may move many readers to tears!

What a phenomenal book. It has been a minute since I’ve felt so engrossed by a story it swallowed me whole. I found myself crying, laughing, angry and grieving — sometimes all in one moment.

Your Blood, My Bones by Kelly Andrew is a horror-bent story about childhood, loyalty, love and death. I mean, it just tackles <i>so</i> many topics and it does it flawlessly.
We follow Wyatt and subsequently Peter & James as they find themselves bound to their childhood memories and each other while an evil force grows increasingly more imminent.

I’ve always been interested by Andrew’s other book ‘The whispering dark’, which I’ve seen to be quite popular but never picked up myself; I will be now!

I can not recommend this book enough! Thank you so much to Netgalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

A gripping premise with Gothic stylistic elements and a fresh interpretation of Peter Pan. Absolutely loved the element of ritual deaths and both Peter and Wyatt's roles in it.

The romance between two leads was delicately and beautifully handled. There was an evolution to their connection that graduated like seasons. Friends, teenage crushes, resentment, and then fuller and more realized love. Kelly Andrew is thrilling in the way she can push and pull the bond between her leads.

The overall execution was fine. The author details botany in a beautiful and passionate manner but tends to overwrite. Metaphors are consistently used to describe emotion immediately after or before dialogue to the point of counting multiple per page, certain words which are lovely once or twice become abrasive or distracting when overused ("corded" comes to mind), and readers are told that James is charming over and over with little to actually show for it.

The foreshadowing was heavy handed, a major character's condition is hinted at over and over to the point where the reader is chapters ahead of Wyatt. Waiting for her to reach the revelation was more of a chore than a celebration. Similarly, I found the ending unsatisfying and the character growth (or sacrifice) unfortunately felt forced or manufactured for the purposes of dramatic tragedy. It also felt unnecessarily punitive.

The story lacks meaningful diversity, which I note isn't a necessity and authors shouldn't feel obliged to include ethnic minorities or LGBT+ characters if they don't have the capacity to write them, but included a completely bizarre scene of a white American woman visiting her child while wearing a kimono to the hospital. Wearing a kimono to the hospital when the wearer isn't Japanese or isn't observing a culturally relevant custom is cultural appropriation. This was neither criticised or delved into.

Overall, the story had its merits and would be a good choice for readers who are dipping their toes into psychological horror and retellings.

Incredible! Kelly Andrew is an instant buy author for me after this and Whispering Dark. Creepy and dark and twisty, an excellent dark fantasy!