#bob report

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poly?? ???? ?

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bob ✨REVIEW✨

being the last and most complete of the “bob reports” regarding ve schwab’s ridiculously named ~bury our bones in the midnight soil~

hell ye i finished it! and i respect you people too much to lie to you, it absolutely won me over. confessedly i am a known enjoyer of lesbians, vampires, and toxicity. BUT "toxic lesbian vampires" as a marketing pitch immediately fills me with distrust and i'm pleased to say that in this case i'd say that distrust was for the most part misplaced! :) anyway this is full of spoilers but so were my reports; this is intended for an audience of people who either don't plan to read the book or don't care about knowing what happens in it ahead of time

THINGS THAT WERE GOOD

fuck dude those vampires sure are lesbians and also toxic (the vampires hit a really nice balance between sexy and scary imo; the protagonists being lesbians was important enough to be relevant especially in the historical settings and casual enough to feel real and natural; the toxicity was pretty unflinching, generally ran two ways, and was deliciously comprised of a combination of inherent power imbalance, unthinking selfishness, and deliberate cruelty)

the lore! with the notable exception of the tears of blood, the in-world vampire lore felt consistent and compelling. essentially they can only be killed if their hearts are destroyed, thus staking works (but the material doesn't matter), as does burning with fire, as does another vampire drinking all their blood. the sun sickens but doesn't kill them, and conversely the nighttime makes them feel more alive; churches/holy objects don't do anything BUT grave dirt (and thus graveyards, often found by churches) "draws them down" because "death calls to death," which was super melodramatic but honestly really fun. i liked that there were enough consistencies with Common Lore that it was easy to believe in the common lore being a mythos developed and distorted by humans over centuries, and at the same time the lore itself felt significantly more consistent/logical than your average vampire story

the timeline - i REALLY enjoyed the episodic nature of sabine and charlotte’s storylines. each period spent in a certain place/with a particular person or people was like its own little narrative, always tinged with a sort of anticipatory dread because you KNOW it has to end and that it will not end well. also i feel this could easily make the plot drag but imo it did not; if anything it was a really effective way of capturing the feeling of a long time passing. i felt carried along quickly but also it feels like years since sabine was maría or since her hector and renata triad.

vampire death - not “how to kill them” but rather this particular take on immorality and how it isn’t real/doesn’t work, which i found super compelling and fun in concept (though the execution was a little dissatisfying, but more on that later). the idea is that while they’re invulnerable to physical decay they still experience … emotional decay, gradually losing touch with their sense of self and individuality and succumbing entirely to Hunger, which makes them reckless and inevitably leads to them putting themselves in danger and dying/being killed. very fun very good

morality- for a while, i was VERY concerned that we had a “conveniently the female vampire protags only feed on Bad Men so we don’t have to feel too squeamish about all the killing” situation on our hands; this concern was rapidly dispelled and then later even textually adresssed. nice!!

the characters! i liked them! i liked sabine as a protagonist and loved her as a villain, and kind of wish we’d spent time in her head once her decay was really underway, though i recognize that it was probably a deliberate choice to leave the reader out of her mind once it ceased to be Hers. i wonder if a similar thing was done with lottie, since we don’t hear from her perspective almost at all in the present day, and it is imo ambiguous how much she has decayed and lost herself (which was very fun👀). i liked lottie a lot too, she charmed me and i enjoyed that even though her main character trait was being a bleeding heart and a lover, that too was twisted into a dangerous/selfish thing … delicious. also, all the side characters were super fun, no notes

THINGS THE QUALITY OF WHICH DEPENDS ON HOW CHARITABLE YOU WANNA BE

pacing - this novel takes place over the course of 5 centuries, it’s long and a lot happens and ve schwab is not Susanna Clarke. I think she did a nice job overall, but it does also have a mild case of the Really Important Events happening quite quickly and often conveniently

women - it’s a narrative about (queer) women claiming power and control for themselves. maría/sabine’s narrative in particular does not do a particularly creative job of this, in my opinion, so i found it somewhat annoying to read.

catty - alice’s sister. lots of time is devoted to flashbacks about her/their relationship, and ultimately … i’m not sure i see the point? it DOES give alice’s driving urge for a new life and a new, more confident persona a more interesting edge than just ‘i’m a shy girl starting uni in a new country’ and i liked catty as a character, and alice’s dependence on her and inherited rage, and the inclusion of a toxic sibling relationship/overall family structure was compelling and nice as a foil/contrast to all the toxic romance going on — in general the variety of toxicity was fun. i also liked that el (alice and catty’s stepmother who catty hates unreasonably and enduringly, bc she can remember their birth mother, which alice can’t) but i also think the narrative was rather mean to catty and … im just not sure how to feel

THINGS THAT WERE BAD

sabine’s death - i don’t buy it, it had so much setup and then felt improbable and overly convenient

@fruitily-pootling mentioned a review they’d seen of addie larue that complained about how the immortal characters never seem to leave europe and as soon as they said it i was intensely aware of it for the rest of the book. i believe a foray into tokyo is MENTIONED. other than that they spend allllll their time in Europe and the US, mostly england, france, and spain. guys pls travel you’re so old and have so much time

sabine’s arc/ending - she became really possessive and jealous after meeting charlotte, at which point we’re also locked out of her head so there’s no chance to explore a deeper nuance to what exactly is going on in there; part of me did think it was kind of compelling as a continuation of the same pattern of abuse that she so chafed against/chose vampirism to escape, but it just felt sudden and is also very not to my tastes. had more of a throughline been drawn from her relationship with hector and renata, where hector called himself renata’s god … i can very much see sabine latching on to that as a desirable form of companionship/possession/control

as i said, the execution of the emotional/personality decay thing was disappointing imo. for one thing not everything needs or, crucially, wants a cool visual cue! sabine’s eyes turning black as she loses her humanity just comes across as silly. but also, i just simply think it was a really great concept that didn’t get the execution it deserved (common schwab L). tbh to really do it Justice you’d have to be super prepared to dig into Humanity as a concept, and what exactly defines it, which is no easy task … again, i really feel like spending some narrative time in sabine’s decaying head would have helped with this, but ultimately it felt like she just turned into a petty psychopath (or a “jealous ex,” as the characters themselves put it), which is simply not very interesting. at least she was incredibly awful and cruel about it <33

ngl there were just SO many corpses and never once a legal investigation or a suspicion of murder. this was largely acceptably explained away but again. 500 years. i just don’t buy it

I FORGOT TO MENTION — she did NOT sell me on the uh. psychic aspects of vampire powers; those were distinctly Vague and Too Easy. also, while we’re on the topic of psychic powers, the revelation that other people with supernatural abilities absolutely only existed to make finding lottie easy, and that is in and of itself so silly because ezra is established to be her friend since she came to the US and it would’ve been equally if not more believable to simply have him know where she was staying???

the writing - look, Schwab’s writing on a craft level is just not for me. i wish she’d learn to put more than one sentence in a paragraph more often and i wish to GOD she wouldn’t start three paragraphs with the same refrain so much. i’m a slut for repetition but once every three pages is simply way too much. i also always ALWAYS feel like schwab’s writing is intensely … aware of itself? this is true 100% of the time including in instagram captions and newsletters

it’s just so stupid that they cry blood

for my darlings @curiousserpent @delanokeay @camphoteric @theatredelabsurde @billyjeanvaljean <33

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…lmfao OKAY schwab

(I put on a YouTube playlist of the composer whose music is supposedly playing too quiet for human hearing in order to guide the vampire and psychic folk of Boston to the special cafe and 12 minutes in I realize I’m hearing that music that was so popular on tiktok. Yknow the one that’s like dadaladaDAladadaDADADADADADA with violins and drama that people use over … the exact kind of edgy aesthetic gothic video i can only assume this book’s promo material would be if schwab did tiktok advertising)

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you fell victim to the third most classic blunder :(( those are the fucking same

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Alessandro (mortal lover of an ancient vampire, refuses to be turned, says he paints best when lightheaded from bloodloss after being fed on) most iconic character in this book so far

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🤔🧐🤨

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my digital library copy of bob expired and went to somebody else and the bookstore by my work was in the process of selling their last copy when I arrived AND my work had no available physical copies (all checked out) and I was despairing because I am Invested now. and then I remembered like a beautiful flash of lightning that light of my life @fruitily-pootling works at a bigger bookstore in the next town over so now my problems are solved

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added a new point to the cons list in my bob review bc i forgot about the silly psychic powers 😞😞