Them Old Bones by Astor Y Teller (Review)

Them Old Bones by Astor Y Teller

Blurb

Behind a veil of treachery and haunted bones, a dragon curse is about to set the world ablaze… Dragons didn’t exist until recently. Neither did traitors, until Miriam Huckerpucker started nosing around in The Vault where she and the other undeads are holed up, when they are not out in the countryside picking up haunted bones, which is what they do for an unliving. For Miriam, who has been in the game for a while, with a refined skill set in magic spelling and swordy gymnastics and mourning classes, the hard part is not bone picking but catching homing pigeons which like all living beings don’t fancy the undead at all. When no pigeons arrive from the undead expedition to barbarian lands, where the first known dragon’s bones lay waiting, Miriam suspects a traitor is messing about with the pigeon post. Mustering someone who is literally dying to get a new occupation and also getting an undead dog into the bargain, her investigations unravel a sinister plot far bigger than The Vault.

Review

Firstly, a massive thank you to Astor Y Teller for gifting me this wonderful book in exchange for an honest review. 

I’m not sure what I was expecting when I started reading this book but I was definitely not expecting this wonderful world Teller has created. The book follows Miriam Huckerpucker who is a bone collector for The Vault. She is also an undead with an unusual skill set of swordy gymnastics and magic spelling. She also overthinks things and has a suspicious mind. 

On one of her adventures Miriam meets Crazyjones who is a farmer and the adorable Tenderloin who is his dog but things are not as they seem. This meeting is a fantastically funny introduction to the book and introduces these wonderful characters to the reader. There is no messing about with this book and you are thrust straight into the storyline which I loved. 

I loved Teller’s writing style and imagination and I flew through this book and laughed constantly. The names of the characters are hilarious and are excellent descriptions for the characters. I also love the world that Teller has created and I can’t wait to learn more about The Vault and the undead. I’m also fascinated by the bones and really hope we learn more about it all. I’m also hoping to see a lot more of Tenderloin as he is very cute (yes he is my favourite character). I loved this book and can’t wait to read the next one. This is a definite 5 out of 5 Dragons from me. 

🐲🐲🐲🐲🐲

About the author

Everybody makes a story about themselves. Here is my take:

I started out

1) as a kid telling myself stories using my imagination, then

2) growing up to tell stories to others as a gamemaster (which I still do), then

3) getting sucked most unwilling into occult stuff (the flip side of quantum physics?), escaping that to

4) hesitantly get an education in programming, then

5) surviving dull years surrounded by the machines that go ping and keeping the weekends occupied by reading and being artful and conjuring exhaustion for the work week, then

6) saying enough is enough and submitting myself to another long streak of education, this time in art, where I started out painting (and still do) but graduated in spontaneous storytelling (or bearing witness to my imaginary worlds if you want a fancy way of saying it) then

7) start writing down these stories instead of telling them to an audience, ending up like

1) the kid I began as, telling myself stories using my imagination…

…which is the nation I prefer to be in (after doing my stint of travelling abroad) and where I go by the name of Astor Y Teller.

The rest of me can be gleaned from the books and if not, it’s not worth telling.

Etsy

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