For the month of July, my good friend Maria and I are reading The Bone Witch series. Maria recommended the series to me a while back when I was looking to get into fantasy fiction.

The series is written by Rin Chupeco, a Chinese-Filipino young adult fiction writer. They are the author of The Bone Witch Trilogy (The Bone Witch, The Heart Forger, and The Shadow Glass), The Girl From The Well, The Suffering, Tales of Unquiet Women, The Never Tilting World duology, and more.

The story takes place in a world of eight kingdoms: Istera, Tresa, Dannoris, Yadosha City-States, Kion, Odalia, Arhen-Kosho, and Drycht. All of which have their own cultures and practices, but they all share commonalities as well.

The story continues to feature two different timelines one in which Tea is now a 15 years old Dark Asha who is highly requested to protect others and attend royal events, and one that is a future timeline where she is a 17-year-old Dark Asha fighting the absorbance of the dark rot while seeking to clean up the world of evil Faceless forces who have invaded several of the kingdoms.

In the present storyline, Chupeco further develops Tea’s life as a Dark Asha. She has, in most ways, mastered death and resurrection, which they tell us at the opening of the book.
When we begin, we find Tea trying to force a dead king into telling her information that could lead to the location of her sister’s heart glass. But as we learn in The Bone Witch, King Valor will give her no information.
In the future storyline, we continue to learn that Tea is collecting daeva, but we still don’t know for what purpose.

My favorite aspect of this sequel is the continued development of the characters. The author does a great job at having the characters develop personally and in their relationships with other characters, making it an exciting read. An excellent example of this is the character Zoya. In The Bone Witch, Zoya comes off as extremely annoying and self-centered. Still, in The Heart Forger, Chupeco takes the opportunity to have her “grow up” a bit. This is also true of the relationships between characters. I won’t spoil WHO things happen, but new romantic relationships are formed, new friendships are forged, and existing relationships are tested and strengthened.

One of the most beautiful lessons the characters all have to accept by the end of the novel is said by one of the characters:

“That is the nature of grief. But to grieve means you have loved. To love opens up the possibility for grief. There cannot be one without the other.”

As the second book in the series, this book TAKES OFF; however, the author has a talent for balancing important reminders from The Bone Witch. They do not spend too much time going over details from the previous book, but they drop subtle reminders throughout that strangely could allow you to read this as a stand-alone novel. If you’d like to be fully engrossed in the world, rather than just get to the juicy parts of the story, I would recommend reading from The Bone Witch because you gather a more profound sense of the characters and the ideas that form the different societies. I think this is key to understanding the future timeline in The Heart Forger. Without the context of the first novel, Tea’s actions in the second novel can seem shallow and somewhat crazy. (I think she is totally justified, but I’m also biased, lol.)

This novel leaves you on somewhat of a cliffhanger, which makes you itch for the trilogy’s final book. So many things are left unanswered, and you can sense that (excuse my language) shit is about to go down.
Like The Bone Witch, I would recommend this novel (and the whole trilogy) for those interested in stepping into the fantasy fiction world. This book is young adult-friendly. However, there are more sexually intense scenes (no descriptions of actual intercourse, but things get steamy). There are also brief mentions of what we would consider self-harm, and of course, descriptions of death. As I mentioned last week, the author does an excellent job of not making those parts the center of the moment and not portraying those actions positively.

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