Welcome to the Speculative Chic Book Club! Each month, we invite you to join us in reading a book that is voted on by YOU, our readers. Following a short review, please feel free to discuss the book in the comments!
The Bards of Bone Plain (2010)
Written by: Patricia A. McKillip
Genre: Fantasy
Pages: 336 (Hardcover)
Publisher: Ace
Premise:
With “her exquisite grasp of the fantasist’s craft”* (Publishers Weekly) Patricia A. McKillip now invites readers to discover a place that may only exist in the mystical wisdom of poetry and music.
Scholar Phelan Cle is researching Bone Plain-which has been studied for the last 500 years, though no one has been able to locate it as a real place. Archaeologist Jonah Cle, Phelan’s father, is also hunting through time, piecing history together from forgotten trinkets. His most eager disciple is Princess Beatrice, the king’s youngest daughter. When they unearth a disk marked with ancient runes, Beatrice pursues the secrets of a lost language that she suddenly notices all around her, hidden in plain sight.
Obvious spoiler warning for discussion of a book we all should have read.
Discussion: According to my Goodreads account, this is the third book I’ve read by Patricia A. McKillip. Both of my previous reviews commented on how flowery the prose became in parts, and I really thought I’d be getting more of that here. So I was kind of surprised that I understood everything that happened and ended the book with zero questions about how the resolution played out. Not that she fully explained every aspect of her world building — it took me until she explicitly stated it to understand that someone had turned to stone and back to human again.
Sometimes I read a book and I just hope, at some point, that things become clear. This has always been my approach to McKillip, but I didn’t really need that here. So that was nice.
Overall, I think I liked the book. I do wish she hadn’t telegraphed so hard that Nairn was actually Jonah. I knew from the second they introduced the fact that there might be an immortal bard that that immortal bard was Jonah, and I was kind of disappointed to be proven correct at the end of the book. I don’t think every single book needs to reinvent the wheel, but when your plot kind of hinges on this big reveal at the end, it’s nice if it’s actually a reveal and not just something you’ve been waiting for the main characters to realize since page 20.
I also wasn’t especially a fan of the “romance” that happened in the last two chapters of the book. It was awkward and clearly tacked on and didn’t really make a difference to the plot, we went from “we say hi to each other when we pass on the street” to “daddy I love him” by the end and I was just like . . . . okay? Why shoehorn romance into a novel that doesn’t need it?
I liked the bards, I liked the idea of the magic they’d lost because of Nairn’s failure. I liked the kid in bard school who expected they were hiding the magic from him, and Phelan’s reaction to that kid. I liked Phelan as a character, living in his dad’s shadow and completely and totally uninterested in the direction his life’s taken, to the point that he just wants to phone in his final paper, and getting invested despite himself. I loved the flashback chapters where we saw Nairn’s childhood and how the failure came to be, and the glimpses of his life after failing. And Phelan’s mom was fantastic in the few scenes we got her for.
In conclusion: I gave it three stars on Goodreads and I stand by that assessment. It was good, but not great, and I don’t know that I’ll ever reach for it again. But I liked spending some time in the world.
I enjoy Patricia McKillip’s works, but over the years, I’ve gotten behind on reading her. So I was glad of the opportunity to read this. I thought the story line that involved Nairn, Declan, etc, was well done. McKillip’s writing style is particularly well-suited to giving a mythic quality to the past. This was not my favorite of her books, but I also liked it pretty well.