TL;DR Review: Action-packed, insanely fun, wildly imaginative, and wonderfully human. Non-stop rip-roaring adventure from start to finish.
Synopsis:
WE DIDN’T START THE FIRE . . . BUT OUR GIANT FIRE-BREATHING LIZARDS DID.
You don’t f*ck with the Rakada. The people living in the grasslands of the Tapestry call them the Bone Raiders, from their charming habit of displaying the bones of those they kill on their armour. But being a raider is tough these days. There’s a new Great Khan in the Tapestry. He plans to use his sizeable military to get rid of the raider clans. And then there are the huge fire-breathing lizards that are straying into the grasslands a little too often these days.
Sayana is a raider scout. She knows that to protect their way of life, she needs do something drastic. Like convincing her clan to ride those huge lizards, instead of horses. Sayana doesn’t know how to do it without being eaten and/or cooked alive, but she’d better figure it out fast – or she and her clan, along with every other raider in the Tapestry, will be wiped out.
Full Review:
I was not fully ready for just how damned entertaining this book was!
From the cover—a bunch of badass Mongol-looking warriors with a giant fire-breathing lizard—I expected a good adventure, a lot of ass-kicking, and interesting characters. But what I got was SO FREAKIN’ MUCH MORE.
The Bone Raiders follows the Rakada, a clan of raiders on the Tapestry, a grand Mongolian steppes/plains-like landscape that is harsh, brutal, and sparse, and thus has made its inhabitants likewise. The Rakada are in trouble because the Great Khan has determined to kill all raiders and bring everyone to his capital city, but that’s just getting in the way of their living free and running wild. So naturally, they’re going to fight back.
How, you ask? Well, it’s simple: they’re going to train themselves a great big fire-breathing lizard to be their mount and ride into battle against the Khan’s army.
As expected, this is far easier said than done—but that How to Train Your Dragon-like doing is only half of what makes The Bone Raiders fun.
Don’t get me wrong, I had an absolute blast every time our giant hungry lizard was on the screen, knowing the characters were quite literally one wrong move away from death. But it’s what’s going on around the training part, the character insights and growth, that made this book for me.
We follow two main POV characters in the Rakada:
Sayana, nicknamed “Princess”, a runaway from the capital who hated growing up in high society and instead chose to live wild and free as a raider because at least that way, she always knew where death was coming from. She’s the driving force behind the push to train the fire lizard, so naturally she gets a lot of screen time. Her character growth starts off fairly minor, but the more we get into it, the more we come to realize just how much growing she needs to do—and by Father Sky, she’s damned well going to grow to become the badass we need her to be!
Hogelun, nicknamed “Hogs”, a powerhouse of a raider who’s best at cooking and crushing skulls and leaving the thinking to others. At first, she seems a pretty simple character, but the more we get into her, the more we come to see how complex she is (when she chooses to be). Her story is filled with a whole lot of pain (CURSE YOU, JACKSON!) but the end-result is a true badass who we absolutely love.
The other characters riding alongside them—Chimeg the chieftain, Erhi the archer and healer, Khun the…madwoman who we never really know what’s going on with, and others—are colorful, entertaining, real, and beautifully developed.
There are as many heart-warming moments as there are ass-kicking and laugh-out-loud ones, and this book absolutely tugged on my heartstrings and got me ‘shipping more than a few characters. Truly, an adventure from start to finish, and one that has me DYING to see what comes next in the sequel.
Action-packed, insanely fun, wildly imaginative, and wonderfully human, it has instantly earned its place among my top reads of the year!
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