He literally must feed on pain in order to survive. Kovit, Nita’s maybe-captor maybe-ally, does need to feed an urge, but not for serial murder. They both want vengeance and survival, not to gratify an urge. The heroines wrestle with trading their hearts for stones, so as to not feel badly about cutting people up.

Mia and Nita don’t overlay perfectly, but Mia’s love of chemistry and Nita’s expertise in biology leads me to think they would get along. This has been compared to Dexter, which I see superficially, but it’s actually much closer to Godsgrave by Jay Kristoff. This book makes no excuses for its characters, and yet manages to paint each of them as fully formed human beings. No part of his sadistic mania is downplayed just because he also happened to have a rough childhood or supernatural hungers. The rude, broody hunk really is a sadistic maniac. Nobody is what they seem, and not in a trite, romantic way. I’m glad that it’s ambiguous, since slapping labels on things destroys the nuance of individuals, who are, as the book so succinctly and excellently points out: “people were never just one thing.” It’s hard to say whether it’s emotional trauma and neglect that have rendered her remote from others, or whether she has some innate neurological differences. She prefers medical textbooks and sterile dissection rooms to human interaction, but then again, with whom would she interact? Her parents have moved her all around the world and isolated her, since their black market business doesn’t exactly make friends. Nita is an unusual but hardly unprecedented heroine in her clinical remove from her own emotions. Even when she’s kidnapped to be sold, she wants to get back to the life she had. Removing organs and powdering bone is the life she wants. And dissecting bodies of the conveniently-already-dead makes her feel good. That’s as far as she’s willing to think about things, because she doesn’t like feeling bad. It doesn’t matter if those abilities persist after death, or accomplish anything: if there’s an Unnatural, someone will want the body.

Specifically the remains of Unnaturals, people who have anything from enhanced healing to just rose-pink melanin. Nita is the daughter of some Very Bad People, traffickers in human remains. The whole concept feels so effortless, so intuitive, that you can miss how much thought and effort went into crafting this world and Nita’s place within it. This is one of the most innovative books I’ve read all year, and it doesn’t even seem to be trying hard.

Rebecca Schaeffer’s Not Even Bones is your dark remedy to the fact that Darkdawn got pushed back. You want to know how to do horror and gore and also troubled family dynamics and colonialism in a single YA book? Look no further.

Even bones