Oh, I am so miserably sad at finishing Your Blood My Bones by Kelly Andrew! This was such a great and heartbreaking YA horrormance. It grabbed me by the throat within the first few pages and never let go.
When I first decided this up, I was intrigued by the cover and thought the synopsis sounded interesting. I imagined a cult and star-crossed romance. What we get is and isn’t that. Yes, there is a cult. Yes, there are star-crossed lovers. But what we actually get fells so much bigger and intrinsic to youth. The universal idea of desperately wanting to go home and never being able to reach that place you need, even if you can physically. The concept of home being more than a place, but the people that make it. Wyatt returns home after the death of her father. All she wants is to torch the place to the ground and move on with her life. Instead, she finds Peter, the boy she was in love with as a child, waiting for her. The angst is incredible in this book. If you can’t stand that, then you might not want to pick this up. From the very beginning we understand that this is likely not going to end well. Despite how much they love each other, love isn’t always enough. Love can’t solve everything, no matter how strongly you want it to.
What really is interesting is how this is written. It is very clearly in three acts. We start at Wyatt’s childhood home and the struggle between wanting to be together and wanting to go home. We then move on, having seemingly solved this problem only to have a third act heighten everything we were warned about in act one. I really loved this because it didn’t draw the story out. We learned a bit more about the world. We were given hope only to realize just how futile it was. It really did put us in Peter or Wyatt’s shoes (depending on just how hopeful you were as you read this.)
Your Blood My Bones by Kelly Andrew absolutely is one of those books that you buy a physical copy of just so you can highlight and annotate the heck out of. The prose is so beautiful and the emotions so raw, I absolutely recommend this for someone looking for YA horror and romance. The horror is innate in the beauty and a natural consequence of love and home.
