"𝓑𝓾𝓻𝔂 𝓶𝔂 𝓫𝓸𝓷𝓮𝓼 𝓲𝓷 𝓽𝓱𝓮 𝓶𝓲𝓭𝓷𝓲𝓰𝓱𝓽 𝓼𝓸𝓲𝓵, 𝓹𝓵𝓪𝓷𝓽 𝓽𝓱𝓮𝓶 𝓼𝓱𝓪𝓵𝓵𝓸𝔀 𝓪𝓷𝓭 𝔀𝓪𝓽𝓮𝓻 𝓽𝓱𝓮𝓶 𝓭𝓮𝓮𝓹, 𝓪𝓷𝓭 𝓲𝓷 𝓶𝔂 𝓹𝓵𝓪𝓬𝓮 𝔀𝓲𝓵𝓵 𝓰𝓻𝓸𝔀 𝓪 𝓯𝓮𝓻𝓪𝓵 𝓻𝓸𝓼𝓮, 𝓼𝓸𝓯𝓽 𝓻𝓮𝓭 𝓹𝓮𝓽𝓪𝓵𝓼 𝓱𝓲𝓭𝓲𝓷𝓰 𝓼𝓱𝓪𝓻𝓹 𝔀𝓱𝓲𝓽𝓮 𝓽𝓮𝓮𝓽𝓱."

Hello, toxic lesbian vampires.

This was such an intoxicating book, full of lush and sensual details, darkness and light. I normally fly through a book I’m loving, but this one I needed to slowly savor. The story immerses us in longing, obsession, grief, desire, terror, revenge…all finely wrought in gorgeous prose.

This book isn’t as much about the plot as it is the feeling, a multitude of emotions and sensations, and so many questions.

What is freedom worth? Is it truly freedom if you can no longer fully experience all the senses of being alive? What would you do with centuries of time? Would you tire of existing?

I rounded this one up from 4.5 just because the ending left me a little hollow, but it’s definitely one I’ll be re-reading in hard copy, just a beautiful reading experience.

Thank you so much to Tor for the gifted ebook!

Thank you NetGalley for the e-arc.

What to say about this book? The writing was so captivating. The story was so intriguing. The book was so beautiful. I knew less than 25% of the way through that this would be a 5 star read and it was. I loved each character. I truly felt each of their pain. I love how VE Schwab was able to write the span of 500 years in such a way that I was able to clearly visualize each time period as if I had been there myself. It's gonna be a minute before I stop thinking about this one.

While I don't think this was Schwab's best, I had fun with this book.
The concept of soul-rot could have been explored more. Alice's story felt unnecessary and under utilized. I would have rather seen more from Charlotte.

Absolutely spectacular!!! This novel evoked a range of emotions; the female rage is beautifully depicted. I devoured it.

The story follows three women who become vampires and their experiences with the midnight soil. I was captivated by all three POVs, although admittedly, Alice’s was my least favorite until halfway through.

Be warned — once you pass the 70%, it will be impossible to stop reading. I stayed up way too late to finish this.

Thank you, Tor Publishing and Leo PR, for my ARC!

I loved this sapphic toxic lesbian vampire monster of a book. As always, the lyrical style of the writing is impeccable. This is a character-driven slow burn that is worth its weight in gold. Readers of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue will love this!

3.5⭐️
3 women, 5 centuries, and destructions in their wakes.

It all started with a girl who wanted to be free, and didn’t waste the chance she got. Her name was Maria, but she hated that name. So since she’s “changed”, she claimed the name of her first victim: Sabine. Centuries passed, she met new people of her kind and learned a lot of new things. She had no particular purpose in her life, at that point. Until she met a girl named Charlotte. Then centuries later, another girl named Alice also caught in-between them.

This isn’t a romantic story at all. It’s about obsession and insatiable hunger. It’s very slow paced and too long IMO, but I admit I was intrigued. I loved the vivid atmospheric setting and the strong characterization. Couldn’t say I like the characters, though. Maybe I slightly prefer Charlotte over the other 2. But anyway! I couldn’t connect with Alice’s backstory, I almost always zoned out each time she’s having flashbacks and by the time I reached the end I don’t think it’s that relevant to the plot either.

5 centuries is not a short time, I was skeptical at how easy they got away with what they did. Surely it’s long enough to make people wonder and talk? Especially since they didn’t change their names at all. The story was woven too closely around the 3 main characters personal problems, it’s like the other aspects didn’t exist. Like at least give some scenes when they’re having external problem? And what’s with the chapter numbers always restart for every POV?? What’s the reasoning behind this?

So yeah. Generally it was just okay for me. At least it’s interesting enough to keep me reading & listening, clearly not a small feat considering it’s quite a long book.

I support women's rights AND women's wrongs.

Burry Our Bones in the Midnight Soil follows toxic lesbian vampires across three centuries... Maria in 1532 Spain, Charlotte in 1827 London, and Alice in 2019 Boston. Though the modern storyline, which follows Alice, a Scottish grad student, gets off to a slow start, eventually the stories intertwine in an absolutely entralling way that had me forgiving the slow beginning. Every character is deeply flawed and beautifully written. I loved that the novel played with vampire lore in a way that felt both true to form and also something entirely new. I will be thinking about this book forever.

Loved the first 75% of this book but the ending lost me unfortunately. Wasn’t entirely sure where Schwab was headed or what sort of message she was sending. Which is a shame because I like Lottie’s and Sabine’s POVs and think the vampire rules were cool but the ending really let me down

I hate to say it since I was SO excited about this book, but I didn't love it.

I love the style of Victoria Schwab's writing, and Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil was one of my most anticipated releases of 2025. I was super excited to have been granted an ARC back in October of 2024, but as I picked it up time and time again between then and now, the story continually failed to suck me in, and inevitably, I switched to reading other things time and time again. In mid-March, I made a concerted effort to get this read and reviewed well before the release date...and, well, here we are, ON the release date, and I have just finally finished reading it because I felt like I HAD to finally get it done.

Now, after having read it all, I feel very much the same way about Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil that I felt about The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, so if you loved that one, there's a good chance that you will also love this one, too.

To me, it felt like a lot of pretty writing in an overly long and repetitive story where not much really happens, and I just wished it had been so much more than it was. I thought the pacing was off (it was all over the place - speeding through moments I wanted to last and lingering for WAY too long on some of the slower and more mundane parts), and I think that if this book lost 100 or so pages, it wouldn't suffer whatsoever.

The second half of the book was more interesting to me than the first half, but it still wasn't enough to change my initial opinion, and the ending left me feeling totally underwhelmed.

I'm giving this one 3 stars because the writing IS beautiful (which is to be expected from Schwab), and I really appreciate what she was trying to do here, but it just fell flat for me in the end.

Well, this lived up to the "toxic lesbian vampire" label. I feel like I will be unpacking it for a few days, but it does a good job of creating lore that incorporates some of the familiar vampire tropes while also creating fresh elements that create something new. I enjoyed Schwab's focus on the women's lives and stories, both from before and then after they were turned, and I liked that at a certain point, we stopped hearing things from certain perspectives as the characters changed. The approach Schwab takes with the slow decay and loss of the things that make us human gives depth to her vampires and makes them more interesting than either a full "they're evil and inhuman" or "awww no, they're just misunderstood creatures" approaches. I'm always going to be here for Schwab's work and this one did not disappoint.

Thank you to Tor and NetGalley for the opportunity to read Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil early in exchange for a review.

The year is 1532, and Maria wants more from her life than the marriage and family planned for her. The year is 2019, and Alice feels alone and unsure what exactly her future holds. The year is 1827, and Charlotte feels like a prisoner to her fate. These women want more than what they are destined for, and they're willing to fight for it - teeth bared.

V. E. Schwab is one of my favourite authors and I am always so thrilled to delve into her world again. Reading one of their books is like a cold drink of water after a long walk in a hot place. Sometimes I don't even realize how badly I've been craving it until it's in my body. Her writing is so lyrical and immersive that I was there the entire time, a first-hand observer to the stories and experiences of these women. For me, their books always read more like movies, in that I can see everything unfurling before me in technicolour. Our protagonists are easy to root for, and our "villain" is so well-created that I sympathized with her the entire way. These are women, fighting for more than table scraps, gouging their stories into the book of life with a knife.

Did I mention: everyone is gay! The vampires are fearsome and vicious, the land is watered in blood and Schwab's prose is so lush I could taste the iron on my lips. I cannot sing enough praise for this book, so I'll stop trying. V. E. Schwab, you have my entire heart.

CW blood, violence, murder, death, emotional & domestic abuse, sex (some questionable consent)

*Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a copy*

As soon as I saw that I got approved for this on Friday, I started it immediately. I absolutely LOVED it oh my god!!

Toxic lesbian vampires?? That’s all I needed to know going in, and that’s all I did know going in. And it was so worth it doing it this way.

I loved this book and I hope everyone else does too!!

V.E. Schwab absolutely knocked it out of the park with this book. Similar to Addie Larue in that we're looking into the inconvenient lives of three women, but (in my opinion) so much more compelling. I was so intrigued by this book, and whenever we went to another character's POV, I wanted to know what was going on with the other two.

In this story, we follow three (or four, depending on your interpretation): Maria/Sabine, Charlotte, and Alice. All three are vampires who were turned without fully realizing what that was going to mean for their lives. Maria and Charlotte are "changed" to escape marriage and find freedom, whereas Alice is changed without her consent.

The rest of the story recounts the lives of all three characters up to the point where Alice wakes up as a vampire and has no idea what is going on. It was so fun to see the advantages and severe disadvantages of being a vampire and what women were willing to do to have agency over their own lives.

People say that every V.E. Schwab book is written for a different kind of reader, and this book was absolutely written for me. It's such a fun sapphic vampiric story about freedom, self-control, sacrifice, grief, loss, and living despite all of that sacrifice, grief, loss, etc.

Did it break my heart? Yes. Do I think Alice deserves better? Yes. I hope she's doing all right out there.

This book is not at all what I was expecting, and I loved it! I have a tendency to go into books blindly, and I'm so glad I did because I had zero expectations for this book other than I loved Addie LaRue so I was eager to read another VE Schwab book! I do think some of Maria/Sabine's parts were slow and didn't always connect to the rest of the story, but I loved Lottie and Alice's stories and I felt the book really picked up with their timelines. Overall, I highly recommend this book!

V.E. Schwab's Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil is an epic tale of three women vampires who all search for the same thing - love and belonging. The book takes place in three intersecting timelines: Maria (1521-2019), Charlotte (1827-2019), and Alice (2019).

Maria is a young woman in Spain in 1521. She is beautiful and spirited, and prone to being more adventurous and tempestuous than her station as a woman warrants. She becomes betrothed to a handsome Viscount, who takes her from her home to his home far away. She is trapped there by her husband and her mother-in-law, a bird in a cage longing for the freedom to embody her powerful personality.

Alice is an 18-year old Scottish girl in her first semester at Harvard. She is shy and full of anxiety, not just because she is so far from home, but because she is gay and wants to hide it from her suitemates and dorm mates. There is also some tension with her older sister Catty that is woven into her story.

Charlotte is a sensitive young woman living an idyllic life on her family's estate in England. When Charlotte is discovered in an uncomprimising situation with her best friend, she is sent to her aunt Amelia's in London to be groomed for meeting a proper (male) suitor in court. Instead she falls in love with a mysterious woman.

Through a long and winding tale, the lives of these three women eventually intersect and become tangled, driven by love and choices and revenge.

I loved The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue so I had high hopes for Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil. I have to admit I was a little disappointed because it wasn't as good as Addie. I enjoyed the book but it was a slow burn - it wasn't until I was two-thirds the way through that it finally hooked me in and became unputdownable. The beginning parts about Maria's life were detailed and long. I know that Schwab was trying to set up the story and that she had almost 500 years of Maria's life to detail, but I think she could have cut a lot of it to bring in the tension of the story sooner. I kept wondering when we were going to get to the point. I've read a lot of books about vampires and was hoping for something a bit different than the standard tropes. Schwab eventually did but I had to slag through a lot to get there.

3 stars for the beginning, 4 stars for the end: overall 3.5 star rating.

Thank you Tor Publishing and NetGalley for providing me an ARC of this book for review. All opinions are my own

I am unwell. This was such a breath of fresh air. I went in somewhat blind and was very pleasantly surprised to find a dark, gothic "fantasy" that included a historical three-POV tale of women who were turned into vampires against their will. But don't expect the kitchy stereotypical vampire/romantasy story. In fact, the word "vampire" only appears 4 times in 560 pages. I LOVED that. Instead, the lack of the term allowed the reader to be taken out of what you normally expect from a story about vampires. VE Schwab almost recreates the idea of the undead - she includes some traditional themes and characteristics but adds a few very original twists. I adored the poetic theme - the "bury our bones" lore that is somehow passed down generations but nobody knows why or where it started.

There are angry, vengeful women. There is betrayal. There is an interweaving of their stories. Each character lives their own truth - and it is not always clear what the truth is. The gothic vibe was immaculate. The different POVs were engaging. For such a long book, it was definitely a slow burn, but the writing was so good and the characters were so complex that I couldn't put the book down. It is sapphic, but there really isn't any spice - however - the lack of spicy scenes did not take away from the complicated romantic relationships.

Seriously I will not stop raving about this book. I can't wait to re-read it, and I have not re-read a book since Twilight came out.

Alright book lovers, prepare to be swept away! Today, we celebrate the release of the extraordinary V.E. Schwab's latest masterpiece, "Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil". Schwab has done it again, crafting a narrative that transcends time and emotion, weaving together stories of hunger, love, and rage.

Dive into the lives of María in 1532, longing for freedom and defying destiny. Then, journey to 1827 London with Charlotte, whose tender heart leads her into a world where freedom comes at a steep price. Finally, join Alice in 2019 Boston, a young woman on a quest for answers and revenge.

This isn't just a book; it's an experience. It's about the raw, unfiltered journey of life, from its delicate beginnings to its inevitable end. Are you ready to explore the depths of human emotion and the tangled threads of fate? Grab your copy of "Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil" today and get ready for a reading adventure like no other!

Fantasy • Romance • Light Horror • Queer
🥂 Happy Pub Day • 10 June 2025

♡ Thank you @torbooks for the ARC!

I’m sure everyone has already heard of this book, so I’ll just state that I had high expectations — and they were met!

❥ If you are enthralled by vampires, if you love poetic prose, if you live for strong women who refuse to be victims… read this book.
❥ If you love morally grey villains: read this book.
❥ If you want to be wildly entertained — also read this book 🙌🏽

You will get 3 POVs and it will be a bit unclear at first why we are interested in them and how they are connected… but as we learn more, magic happens.

In some ways one might say it’s just another vampire story, but there’s something about @veschwab ‘s writing and how the subplots come together that made me emotional 🥹 oh, to be human. To love ❥ to taste ❥ to feel ❥ …to live.

▶︎ •၊၊||၊|။||။‌‌‌‌‌|• 🎧 I listened to the first 12 chapters thanks to a preview from @macmillan.audio but read the remainder of the book in print! I enjoyed both, but I will say, the audio features an all-star cast: Julia Whelan, Katie Leung, and Marisa Calin — I would have listened had I had the full audiobook!

This book absolutely RUINED me, but in the best way possible. I was already a Schwab fan, so I wasn’t surprised that I loved this one so much. The writing is rich and eerie, and I got completely lost in the world and emotions of the characters. The feminist themes hit hard, the passion and toxicity were intense, and the heartbreak? Oh, it DEFINITELY hurt. I sobbed a few times while reading this one, and when I hit the last page, I just sat there, emotionally wrecked. If you love toxic lesbian vampires that mess with your feelings, then yeah, I would absolutely recommend this one.

There is no author that writes the dark aesthetic as passionately or beautifully as Schwab does, this book is a masterpiece with so much to say. I devoured this one slowly and then read it again, I just couldn’t let go of these women and the bits of myself I found in them. Schwab creates a world you can get lost in with a poetic feel her writing is captivating, intelligent and filled with delicious metaphors and underlying meaning that pulls you in so deeply you feel how personal this book is to its author. These woman are all so different with their journeys spanning time in multiple narratives but the thread they share I felt runs through so many of us. I adored Alice and resonated with her so much but each character was so vividly depicted it was such a delight to know them. They were messy and sassy with a rage and a hunger for freedom and independence each shown in their own way. The underlying ties to feminism were perfectly written through the stories of these women and I felt seen in a way I loved. The structure of the story was well thought out and executed in a way to let the story unfold slowly but without losing its intensity so you didn’t want to stop turning the pages. I am honored to have been given the chance to read this early I wasn’t prepared for how deeply it would pull me in or for how beautifully it would leave me in the end. This is Schwab’s best work and exactly why she’s my favorite.