written to “demonstrate the violence and tragedy of colonization,” to the bone is a stark, intimate story set during the starving time in jamestown.

i still don’t know how to feel about this book. it’s very well-researched, with an underlying sense of creeping dread, but i think bruzas’ choice of narrator restricts the scope of the story too much given her goal in writing it. ellis is an uneducated indentured servant, so her perspective is necessarily limited and often focused more on the personal tragedy of her life rather than the larger tragedy the settlers—ellis included—are inflicting on the native americans. bruzas manages a lot of nuance despite those limitations, but i think footnotes, or maybe a second POV, would have been helpful to further explore some of the themes she touches on.

i’m also not sure how i feel about the writing style, which leant itself to the horror aspects of the novel but sometimes felt overly simplistic for historical fiction.

i can’t say i enjoyed to the bone, but i do think it was a worthwhile, compelling read about a horrific chapter in history.

I received an ARC of this novel from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I learned quite a bit about the early settlers that I wasn't taught in school. History is so important.

I was in either Fairfax or Yorktown for almost all of elementary, middle, and high school, not to mention college. I've done school trips to Monticello, Mount Vernon, and had the historical reenactor who inspired the look for Disney's Pocahontas visit our class to tell us everything that was wrong with the movie. And for *some* reason I never heard about the 'Starving Time'. I think I would have remembered that, even if the teachers had omitted the cannibalism. Instead I get to learn about it at the age of 46 from a YA historical fiction novel.
While this is indeed a YA historical fiction novel, it's dark. There's cannibalism, there's gore, there's the creeping horror of isolation, there's the breath taking audacity of colonizers arriving with little food and no concrete plan to obtain more beyond hoping the people already living there giving it to them.
While this is a very good book, it is an intense read.
Thank you very much to NetGalley and Penguin Young Readers Group and Rocky Pond Books for the ARC!

I am a history teacher and I loved this historical fiction novel for middle school and high school students. I enjoyed the colonial America setting and the Erie vibes that this book had. I would love to recommend this book to my students.

Stark and disturbing but distressingly true recreation of The Starving Time in the Jamestown Colony in the 1600s. This novella follows the story of an indentured servant brought to the Americas in search of her father and a better life who instead finds hardship, cruelty and evil. This is an incredibly difficult read but an important commentary on the hubris of colonization and the pervasiveness of greed.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for my copy. These opinions are my own.

After the death of her mother and sister, a young girl named Ellis seeks a position as an indentured servant to a married couple traveling to James Fort. Once there, she hopes to find her father who settled in the colonies a few years back. However, Ellis soon wonders if she has trapped herself in a prison rather than a new life. Master Collins begins to show a growing controlling abusive nature towards herself and Mistress Collins. The viciousness of the colonists towards the indigenous population is making tensions brew and the surrounding area increasingly more dangerous. The only bright spot in this new life is Jane, the bold and beautiful girl she has begun to fall in love with. But with winter coming, a deep hunger grips the fort. And now they must all do what it takes to survive.

I’ve noticed a recent trend towards colonial era stories and it’s a little worrying. I don’t fully trust white authors to handle the subject matter appropriately. However, I think Alena did a solid job. She was able to inspire sympathy for the horrors our main character faced without painting the colonists in a positive light. The suffering Ellis faced was solely at the hands of her own people. Ellis comes from a very poor and uneducated background. She doesn’t know what her indentured contract entails as it is hidden from her. She is lowest on the peaking order, relying solely on leftovers for food. She is treated as property. But she is still a colonist. She still lacks an understanding of the selfishness of her people as even she dreams of owning land in this new country. At the end of the story I still felt firmly on the side of the Powhatan, as they were never the villains of the story. It was the hubris and violence of the European settlers that caused their own suffering.

Well researched historical fiction will always hold a place in my heart. Alena provides a selected bibliography at the end of To the Bone that lists a few of the sources she consulted in her research. Her author’s note is a must read as it delves deeper into the real historical figures she based her characters off, as well as the events that inspired the story. She points out a few verbatim quotes she used in her dialogue that came from primary accounts as well. Even without these resources you could still pick up how well researched this is just by the language used in the prose. There were many terms I had to look up because I’d never come across them before, only to learn that they were 15th century vocabulary. How cool!

This story is horrifying. It details the violence of colonization, the plight of indentured servants, life in the colonies as they tried to uphold the same religious, classicist, sexist social hierarchies from back home. I could totally see this being an assigned reading in school because of how educational it was.

This book read like a slow descent into despair. I had a hard time in the beginning of the book—some of the details felt so random—but as the story continues to spiral towards something more sinister. The narrative style was so well done, and the voice of Ellis made the wound cut a little bit deeper. The hardships faced by the settlers was put into their proper place—historical accuracy was extremely important, and that is clear in the text. The story became so intense I couldn’t put it down!

Definitely recommend!
Thank you Netgalley and the publisher for an advanced copy of this book. Opinions are my own.

Thank you Netgalley for the E arc of this release!

Now, this had everything to be a perfect fall read, and guess what, it is. It is grim, first and foremost. This is YA(I'm sure) but for YA this pulls no punches. This blends horror and history perfectly. 4.5 stars

Ellis is an uneducated Englishwoman, following her father's footsteps and traveling to the New World after the deaths of her mother and younger sister. Being poor and untalented, Ellis becomes indentured to the Collins family, helping Master Henry Collins with building their house and growing crops, and tending to the needs of his pregnant wife, Mistress Blythe Collins. She finds herself falling for the free spirited Jane Eddows, but Master Collins says that she is a wicked girl and prevents Ellis from seeing her. While Ellis came to the settlement to find her father and to get a new lease on life, she slowly begins to learn that life in the colony isn't as glamorous as she imagined, especially as winter begins.

'To the Bone' is not an easy read. At just around 150 pages, it took me longer to get through than some 400 page novels. There are two reasons for this: One is Ellis's writing voice. She writes in choppy half-sentences and run on sentences, which help to illustrate her being uneducated. While this works, I did find it a bit annoying at times, especially with how often she chants to herself about being not good. Being bad. Being wicked. The other reason is how -bleak- the story is. Maybe I wasn't in the right headspace to read it, but there are times when so much pain and suffering just kind of loops back into being comical. It's sad when people die from easily-prevented deaths and back stab each other, but when background characters who are barely more than names get brought back in later chapters just to die every other page, it seems a bit silly. I know it's set in the Starving Time and that the cast should be dropping like flies, but so little time is spent on characters outside of the Collins and Eddows households that it feels more like a list of names than a tragedy.

While there is a bit of a sapphic love story in the book, I wouldn't recommend this book based on that alone. I didn't find Jane a particularly compelling character--she never tries to be secretive about their relationship even though she knows Ellis is forbidden from seeing her and doesn't seem to be genuinely sad about the things that affect Ellis (at one point, Ellis is sad at the sight of a dead snake, and Jane gives her a flat 'well everything dies' response). I think even her realizing that Henry is not good and giving Ellis more of a 'hey this guy's taking advantage of you' chat instead of a 'haha, your master is a loser with no friends' chat would have helped endear me to her more. I'd hardly consider their relationship a love story, since they mostly just kiss a bit when no one's around.

What I found most disappointing, however, was the relationship between Blythe and Ellis. Our introduction to Blythe is Ellis being disgusted by her, combing her greasy hair and retching from her smell. Blythe doesn't have many kind words to say about Ellis, either--when we finally hear her side of things, she describes Ellis as a little dog who does whatever her husband says. They are both victims of Henry's abuse and see what happens, but are silent and unsympathetic to what happens to each other. There is a nice moment between them, where Ellis is combing through Blythe's hair and Blythe opens up to her a little, but it seems like a reset button is hit after each nice moment they have. It's a shame, because I wanted to see their relationship grow.

I didn't like most of the characters, but I do want to give a shout out to Rowan. I liked that he was a sensitive guy who loved animals, and was never seen as weaker by the narrative for it (even though he was certainly punished). I'll admit, I felt sadder for his chicken's death than most of the human characters. Poor Peasblossom (which I realize now is probably -not- a Midsummer Night's Dream reference in the canon of the book since the play came out less than a decade before the book, though I guess it's possible Rowan saw it before crossing the Atlantic Ocean and was so moved by an incidental fairy character that he had to name a chicken after her).

'To the Bone' isn't a bad book, but I think it's hurt by following the fates of its historic counterparts to a T, especially with the Collins family. There is simultaneously too much and not enough before the Starving Time sets in--more character build up and interactions would help, but less fluff that amounts to 'I went swimming with Jane and her skin was soft on mine and she was beautiful'. I appreciate the research that went into making the food production and building construction period-accurate, but following the steps of grinding and washing and baking grain over and over again doesn't make for an entertaining read.

4.5

I'm having a hard time deciding where to start this review. This book is excellent. I will start with that.

I read Alena Bruzas' first novel, Ever Since, and absolutely loved it. I fell in love with her writing, the way Bruzas tells a story, and how successfully she was able to pull me in to what was happening from an emotional standpoint. Needless to say, I was very eager to get my hands on this, her sophomore novel. This book? So very different. So, so different. But I enjoyed it immensely all the same -- albeit for different reasons.

From the very first page of this I was immersed in this story. I truly felt like I was a shadow on the wall, like I was transported to this time in history and walking along side our main character, Ellis, while things were happening. It was actually a very unique perspective, because it didn't feel like I was living in the main characters head so much as being able to snap my fingers and follow along with a real life person experiencing a real life event in our very real and dark history. Kind of like being part of an immersive history channel episode.

This was an exceptionally dark, but wonderfully crafted story. I could feel this overwhelming sense of dread pulsing as an undercurrent throughout each page of this book that gradually got louder and louder until you were in the thick of exactly what you knew was coming. Just phenomenal storytelling. I only wish that we were able to dive a little bit deeper into some of the other characters -- but part of me wonders if her decision not to do that was intentional.

I think Bruzas did an excellent job handling very sensitive subject matter with care while also not holding back from showcasing the brutality that was the reality of that time (much of which hasn't truly faded as much as we wish it to be true). I also appreciated the fact that she went out of her way to post about trigger warnings (VERY IMPORTANT, please take note of these and proceed accordingly) and discuss her approach to some of those sensitive issues in her acknowledgments.

I walked away from this with a desire to learn more about this chapter from our history book, and immediately found myself on the internet looking into the real life events that inspired this story. So I think it's safe to say that this book did its job well.

Shout out to the narrator for the audiobook as well - I think this is an excellent book to consume via that medium, should you be inclined to do so.

I also want to acknowledge how incredible I think it is when an author can write stories that vary so drastically from each other. It makes me very excited to read whatever comes next, not only because I know I enjoy her writing, but also because I have no idea what kind of story it will be.

Excellent.

4.5 stars

This book was SO good and just utterly horrifying. I grew up near Jamestown and visited several times for field trips, and remember how shocked and shortchanged I felt when I got to college and found out there was cannibal lore in the history there that I had never been told. When I saw that this book was set in Jamestown during the Starving Time, I was excited and intrigued, and hoping it wouldn't gloss over the details like my schools had. Well. It did not. I can't believe this is YA, despite the protagonist's age, because it is DARK.

Ellis is a teen girl who arrives in America full of hope for a new life in 1609. After the plague deaths of her mother and sister back in England, Ellis secures an indenture with Henry Collins and his pregnant wife. She spends her off time exploring the settlement and the surrounding forest with the beautiful and free-spirited Jane, and their best friend Rowan. But as summer turns to fall and then winter, the settlers' relationships with the natives sour and the carefree warmth of the new world grows sharp teeth. Despite their fear of the Powhatans, the colonists soon realize that they have the most to fear from their own neighbors, as the fight for resources turns deadly. 

This is a short read, and I highly recommend if you have any interest in history, but caution you that while there are trigger warnings at the start of the book, there are some things that might upset readers that are not explicitly listed there, so be careful! I have a feeling this one will get a lot of bad reviews, but I binged it in a night and have been thinking aout it for days since. It is bleak, but worth it. Thanks to Penguin Teen and the author for the advance copy in exchange for my honest review.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the eARC. This was a very vivid account of settlers coming to the new world. It was very graphic and very violent, not for the faint of heart. The book was hard to follow occasionally, almost as if the names and info was given too quickly or all at once. It was interesting but very bleak.

3,5

it was incredibly shocking, although at the beginning it was quite boring, BUT then everything somehow started to change and I can't take my eyes off this book, and it still makes me sick and again shocking from what is happening.

I definitely wouldn't read this a second time, but for the first and only time, it's wow.

I really love the perspective this book explored. Ellis is young, uneducated, but looking for a better future where she can be free and happy with someone who loves her. She catches glimpses into the problems of the world she lives in (the abuse she and her mistress receive from her master, the mistreatment and disrespect colonial groups imposed on indigenous peoples, and the senselessness of vilifying homosexuality), but she remains trapped in limbo. As a member of her society, she has little influence and even less power, unable to change the dark realities she faces or rise up to be the powerful heroine many YA books advocate for. However, I think the story of a girl who doesn't fill the "chosen one" role, but instead simply lives her life and endures some truly horrific things, her story and the internal journey she goes on to grapple with who she is and what she believes is even more important than a powerful girl-boss story. We all have to grapple with cognitive dissonance between what we believe to be good and our treatment of others, both as an individual and as a society. We all have difficult decisions to make that have permanent impacts on our own lives and the lives of those around us. All in all, this is a valuable story about a significant period in early US history, and one that explores the hopes and dreams driving early colonizers without excusing the atrocities committed while pursuing those goals.

Content Warnings: domestic abuse, starvation, cannibalism, LGBTQ prejudice

Language: Mild
Violence: High
Drugs: Mild
Sex: Moderate

It feels like this would be a hard book to recommend to anyone because it’s so dark, but I’m still glad that I read it. The setting and time period was obviously well researched. The minimal writing style placed me in Ellis’s head and did an incredible job of amplifying the tension. This was a refreshingly short and interesting historical horror novel,,

Well, that was awful. I mean that in the best possible way, because this book follows our narrator through some truly grisly events. The fact that the prose is quite spare and direct only adds to the effect, because our narrator Ellis describes some truly upsetting things in a deeply matter-of-fact tone. Please read the content notes provided in the front of the book, as this story is technically based on a true crime early in US history. It's... wow, it's rough.

Going into this, I thought it would be horror in a more genre-specific sense of the word. In fact, the author brought horror novel sensibilities to a book that, from what I can tell, follows historical events with as much accuracy as possible, with a few slight adjustments for narrative cohesion. It was really good, but as someone who's been reading a lot of depressing nonfiction, oof, some parts were rough reading.

4.5*, partly because it was so engaging, partly because I think the author effectively conveyed the things she wanted to get across, and partly because the extensive notes in the back solidified my sense that she was making a concerted effort to walk a careful line between empathizing with suffering people while also acknowledging the issues of colonialism and violence that caused the situation in the first place.

Thank you to the publisher for the ARC. My thoughts are my own and left voluntarily.

This is a young adult novel, which I forgot. It’s dark. It’s very dark. I definitely believe this book would be suited for someone older, or a very mature teen who won’t be as disturbed with the dark themes in the book. I’m well above the target age for this book and I was still bothered. I understood what it was about beforehand but I was quite tempted to stop reading when the little doggie Spider appeared because I knew. Probably the one thing that was enjoyable in this book was Ellis’ blossoming friendship and relationship with Jane. The romanticism of the colonists was a bit of a letdown. We know that they weren’t good people at all. The disjointed, stream of consciousness narration might be jarring to some. (Thank you NetGalley)

This book wasn't quite what I expected. The subject matter of people starving to death has to be dark, but I never truly connected to the horrors. Bruzas hits on a bunch of topics-starvation, cannibalism, the atrocious acts against Native Americans, mental health, abuse, and a sapphic relationship. None of these had the depth that I had hoped for.
It's not a terrible book and a quick read if you're in the mood for such.
#NetGalley

It was hard for me to get into it because I wasn’t really invested in any of the characters. I loved the historical part of the story and I also enjoyed the dark horror second half. But I didn't like the romance parts at all.

"To the Bone" by Alena Bruzas dives into the dark and unsettling world of colonial Jamestown during The Starving Time, blending historical fiction with horror. The story follows Ellis, an indentured servant, as she navigates the brutal realities of life in the colonies. Her limited perspective adds a layer of psychological intensity, amplifying the horror of both her personal struggles and the broader tragedies unfolding around her. While the historical elements are fascinating, some readers may feel the setting could have used more detail to fully immerse them in the time period.

The novel's shift from romance to horror feels jarring at times, but the growing darkness kept me hooked. The relationship between Ellis and Jane starts strong, though it eventually takes a backseat to the grim atmosphere and eerie events. While the minimalist writing style works for Ellis's limited understanding of her world, it sometimes makes it hard to grasp the deeper societal conflicts. Overall, it's a quick, thought-provoking read, but those expecting a more fleshed-out historical narrative or romance might feel a bit underwhelmed.