Indie Book Review: The Bones of Our House

The TL;DR version

I'm a sucker for a ghost story, and I really enjoyed this one, despite its flaws.

Premise: Anna Pall, an English teacher recently separated from her cheating husband, moves into a beautiful (haunted?) house in the countryside, along with her two daughters, Nina (17) and Sam (10). Curious and creepy events happen, leading to the death of one person.

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The Good

- I loved the story. The ghost aspects were incredibly creepy, had me feeling like I needed to check over my shoulder. I was reminded of Mike Flanagan (without the monologues), of The Shining, and American Horror Story S1.

- The pacing was spot on, too. Small chapters with lots of action; I never wanted to put this book down.

- The opening sentence is excellent:

The house was immense and crawled towards the night sky with the ease of a cat unfurling itself and stretching its back into an arch.

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The Bad-ish

- So, this story is told in "the past" and "the present." In the present, a writer interviews Nina about her experiences in the house. The interviewer did not feel fleshed out. I was reminded of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, which also features an interviewer/interviewee. The difference is that in Evelyn Hugo, the interviewer has her own character arc. Without that, this book lacked some emotional depth.

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The Ugly

- Here is why I'm only rating this 3 stars. There was an abundance of typos and errors. It started small—an errant space after quotation marks, missing commas, etc.

A couple of times, the wrong pronoun gets used, or the wrong name gets mentioned. Example:

If Anna’s stress about her two daughters didn’t kill me, then the house definitely would.

Should be her.

- And again:

She sighed, pulling the skin of her face taught at the eyes and her mouth, looking in vain for the features of the young woman Anna felt that she’d been not so very long ago. John had stolen more than my dignity from his first wife. He had stolen the very vestiges of her youth.

- Then, in Chapter 14, the book suddenly goes from being in the past tense to being in the present tense for a page, before switching back to the past tense. Yes. There is an entire tense change and I'm honestly shocked that none of the other reviewers have caught this massive error.

- There were more errors, I just got tired of noting them.

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Conclusion

So: did I love this book? Honestly, yes. I would read it again. I would even recommend it.

But I can't rate it higher than 3 stars, not while it's riddled with errors.