Three young women from different centuries wrestle with hunger and carve out lives for themselves in Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, a haunting tale of immortality, death, and lesbian vampires by V.E. Schwab (The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue; A Darker Shade of Magic).
In the early 16th century, Maria decides that if she must marry, she will marry someone who will take her away from Santo Domingo, Spain. She succeeds as far as becoming the wife of a viscount, only to find herself in a new kind of cage, until a mysterious widow offers her a choice. In 2019, Alice is determined to make leaving Scotland for Harvard into a new start. An attempt at spontaneity leads to a one-night stand, which in turn leads to a desperate quest for answers. Lottie, who left Alice while she was sleeping, made her own bid for freedom years ago. Now, she has taken to feeding her tender heart on memories in an attempt to avoid a terrible price.
Schwab has created a vampire mythos at once beautiful and dark. Occasional encounters between these women and others of their kind suggest a larger world with more approaches to living as an immortal predator, but most of the time the lens stays tightly focused on these three. The result is both expansive, as their combined story stretches almost 500 years, and claustrophobically close, as the women and readers are trapped in their hunger: for blood, for love, for freedom, for their waning humanity. Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil is a brilliant, emotional fantasy. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library