A House With Good Bones by T. Kingfisher

A House With Good Bones is a gothic horror novel about Sam, a thirty-two year old woman working as a paleo-entomologist who returns to her mother’s home to wait out a work furlough, only to discover that something has gone seriously wrong in her mother’s house. Although her mother has lived in the house for twenty years after Sam’s grandmother’s death, Sam’s mother has painted all of the walls white, returned much of the decor to the way it looked before her grandmother’s death, and is looking excessively ill and frightened. Not long after moving back in, Sam starts noticing absurd behaviors from the local wildlife, and she starts investigating the changes, hoping to restore her mother’s health and sanity. Her quest leads her down the rabbit hole of her family’s odd history and straight into the worst of her childhood memories.

As always with T. Kingfisher books, the worldbuilding in this one blew me away. Of course there’s a good dose of the supernatural, and I loved how it was fed to the reader piece by piece, making the true nature of the world a part of the mystery built into the plot. Equally impressive, though, were the details on Alex’s normal life. Entymology is not a study that I am terribly familiar with, and I have to admit to a personal discomfort with bugs of all kinds. However, Alex’s fascination with insect life of all kinds was catching (at least for the length of the novel), and I loved the opportunity to see the world through her own interests. I also have always felt uncomfortable around vultures, and birds of all kinds, but Alex’s tolerance, as well as Gail’s expertise, gave me a new appreciation of them. As always with T. Kingfisher, this world was built from the ground up, and that supported my suspension of disbelief, leading to a fuller immersion into the story.

This was a shorter read – the audiobook was only about seven hours long. In this case, though, the length was just about perfect, and allowed for a steady pacing that balanced character development with action and conflict. It’s not terribly common these days for me to have trouble putting down a book just because I read so many books these days. This one, however, sucked me in and kept me invested until the very end. Some of this was certainly the good worldbuilding and believable characters, but a lot of it was due to phenominal pacing.

In all, I’ll give A House with Good Bones a 10 out of 10. This novel was incredibly well written, with two distinct worlds that still manage to blend seamlessly, and a quick pace that held my attention until the very end. I think most readers will enjoy it, even those that aren’t huge fans of horror.