Marrow

What’s it about?

In the Bone there is a house.

In the house there is a girl.

In the girl there is a darkness.

Margo is not like other girls. She lives in a derelict neighborhood called the Bone, in a cursed house, with her cursed mother, who hasn’t spoken to her in over two years. She lives her days feeling invisible. It’s not until she develops a friendship with her wheelchair-bound neighbor, Judah Grant, that things begin to change. When neighborhood girl, seven-year-old Neveah Anthony, goes missing, Judah sets out to help Margo uncover what happened to her.

What Margo finds changes her, and with a new perspective on life, she’s determined to find evil and punish it–targeting rapists and child molesters, one by one.

But hunting evil is dangerous, and Margo risks losing everything, including her own soul.

You can buy a copy of this book on AmazonUS / AmazonUK.

Review

This is a very difficult book to rate and I’d even rather not rate it altogether, but I’m settling for 3.5 stars. I don’t even know if I’m being fair and I would understand other people’s ratings being more and less. If I could divide it up, I’d give 3 stars for the plot, but for the writing itself, for creating Margo and the world she lives in, the Bone, I’d give 4 stars easily.

This is one of the few books where I wanted to highlight and bookmark so many phrases.

Sadness is an emotion you can trust. It is stronger than all of the other emotions. It makes happiness look fickle and untrustworthy. It pervades, lasts longer, and replaces the good feelings with such an eloquent ease you don’t even feel the shift until you are suddenly wrapped in its chains. How hard we strive for happiness, and once we finally have the elusive feeling in our grasp, we hold it briefly, like water as it trickles through our fingers. I don’t want to hold water. I want to hold something heavy and solid. Something I can understand. I understand sadness, and so I trust it. We are meant to feel sadness, if only to protect us from the brief spiels of happiness. Darkness is all I’ll ever know; maybe the key is to make poetry out of it.

I found so many truths and sentences that hit home and felt worthy of being read again and again.

“You have to be willing to be happy. Despite the mess of your life, just accept what’s happened, throw away your ideas and create a new map of happiness to follow”. It’s the best thing anyone has ever said to me. The best advice.

I imagine that being wanted is the greatest feeling. A feeling that solidifies your stay in this life, justifies it.

Like I said, the plot was pretty straightforward. Margo lives with her mother. Her mother gets the company of men every night, she mostly ignores Margo or gives her short orders to do. The story really kicks off when little Neveah goes missing. Margo saw her that day and she starts wondering who would want to harm her. She looks around her and when she finds out who is responsible, she is out for revenge. Last time she was overcome by emotion but this time she is fully aware of her actions and so she becomes a modern-day vigilante. I felt the scene with little Tucker was one of the most oppressive scenes in the story and I was glad that Margo was there in the reader’s place.

There are a lot of references to the book’s title too throughout the story.

Judah says that where we’re from is in us—in our marrow. You can put us anywhere else in the world, but we carry our origin with us everywhere we go. If he’s right, I’ll never fucking get away.

When I look in the mirror, I can almost see what I’m made of—the tightly pulled muscle, the bone, the marrow that Judah so often spoke about. There are days when I miss the Bone, and that is when I think about my marrow the most—the who I am, the what I am. You can leave, but it never leaves you.

I was born sick. As was my mother, and her mother before her. It’s in our marrow.

The Bone is in our marrow. It’s complacency and fear handed down from generation to generation.

I didn’t fully understand the whole Judah situation on the other hand. In the place that she is staying for a few months they tell her something about Judah and she accepts it as a truth but once she is back in her old apartment, she contacts him again, no questions asked. I didn’t really understand that little thread. I liked Judah and I thought he would be playing her conscience in the story that wasn’t really so. I did feel a bit like there could have been more and his potential wasn’t fully exploited.

All in all this was a good story. What made it even better was the epilogue where Tarryn tells us what made her want to write this story.

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