Not Even Bones (Market of Monsters #1)

Rebecca Schaeffers Not Even Bones is a bloody romp which explores morality in a world that has little room for things like mercy. Nita has spent years dissecting bodies and helping her mother sell various parts of unnaturals, humans with strange abilities that can be both deadly and odd, on the black market. Nita finds conversing with the dead far easier than with the living, but this way of life has kept her in part ignorant of the world outside. When her mother returns from a hunting expedition with a living, breathing young man as a prisoner, bent on selling his body parts one piece at a time, Nita must decide what kind of person she is going to be. If youre easily squeamish when it comes to blood or severed body parts, Not Even Bones may not be the novel for you. But if youre like me, youll appreciate that Schaeffer takes her gloves off in this one, so to speak, embracing the gruesomeness of the story and testing her characters at every turn. There are no clear-cut good and bad characters in this one. Though you may root for someone like Nita, she isnt without her flaws. But she like many of the other characters are very human. They show selective empathy, making good and bad decisions in equal measure. Sometimes they are forced to ignore other peoples pain and sometimes they even delight in it. In the end, they are just trying to survive in a world that decided they are less than human. Not Even Bones is the start of a unique and deliciously disturbing series that challenges both its characters and its readers.

Originally I was reading the comic version of the story but got tired of waiting for episodes. Im glad I read the book because (as always) there was a lot of info missing from the comic that I was able to learn from the book. I loved the characters and the story, the only reason Im giving it 4 instead of 5 stars was because I felt a lot of the info could have been left out. It occasionally came off as preachy/critical about how different cultures deal with various human issues. I felt like it took away from the story and was more fluff for page length than anything though I did appreciate the irony considering Nita was no better than the cultures she was chastising. It also didnt seem realistic that a 17yr old would be dwelling on history like that when she didnt have an education beyond elementary school and the science books she studied. Her mother clearly didnt spend any time teaching her basic high school math or physics as demonstrated when Kovit explained some basic theories to her which further put doubt in my mind as to her education. I think the only other thing that annoyed me was that the story seemed to change tense in a weird way… or at least it felt like it did? Im not sure how to explain it. Like we would be seeing things in the third person and then suddenly we would hop into Nitas head and hear things using her voice only to pop back out in the third person again but it happened so often and in a jarring way that I found myself thinking, Why is she talking about herself in 3rd person? Oh, wait… it was strange.

So before I start with anything, this definitely should not be in the YA section. It\’s full of gore and scenes of torture that I believe adults would be more adapt to handle. I can read quite a bit of anything before it crosses a line. Nothing in here really crossed a line for me so nothing really bothered me. I just would not want my teenage child to read a book like this imo. Anyway, this book is just dull and boring. I have no issues with violent, gory books. In fact, for the most part, I tend to enjoy them when it makes a point. In comparison, I read a book recently that had more gore than this book (descriptive to the point I could taste the blood on the pages) and even that didn\’t affect me. This book just drags on and on and goes in circles without making a point to the story. It\’s also paced quite strangely and doesn\’t flow very well. Nothing makes sense in Nita\’s world for the reader to connect. I wanted to connect to this story and root for both Nita and Kovit a lot. I really wanted to enjoy their arcs for what they were (I\’ve read the second book hoping to achieve that clarity and was sadly disappointed). Here\’s what I liked about the book: it\’s different from a lot of things out there. It deals with morality, right and wrong, the grey of inbetween and what is means for those characters. It doesn\’t try to paint these characters in a good light but it does try to make you want to root for them (regardless of how bad they are as people). I like books like this that make me really try to answer difficult questions regarding the value of lives. What I didn\’t like: there was no impact to these decisions. Nita is too back and forth all of the time with herself without really having a reason to kill people. I really liked reading her conflict with injuring a live person compared to a dead one she was so familiar with, but then it\’s like a switch was flipped after her first real human kill. And the consequences as to why they bothered her weren\’t written well. The idea was there, it wasn\’t executed properly and the delivery fell flat. I get where the author was trying to go regarding Nita and her need to survive, but I actually related to Kovit\’s inner conflict more. He was written better than Nina and I understood his lines, his rules, his thoughts and decisions. I think it also has to do with that Kovit saw himself as a monster regardless of everything and so he was more distinct from Nita. Anyway, I just wish there was more to the story because in the past two books I\’ve read, it just drags and has things happen for no real reason and it hasn\’t built up Nita imo. I haven\’t seen her really grow as a character in a way that makes sense to me. Kovit has grown a lot and changed in a way where I feel for him and his crazy persona. I like Kovit and this may have been done better from his point of view because at least the author got him right. Such a shame because the idea behind this story is amazing.

Nitas mother is a sociopath. She kills unnaturals and brings them home for Nita to dissect and package for sale on the black market. Nita enjoys her work until one day her mother brings home a boy her own age and expects Nita to help her with vivisection. Nita defies her mother and liberates the boy. But her mother punishes her by letting her be kidnapped for sale of body parts. Lots of suspense. Nita is making friends with another sociopath who is a Zannie. Zannies are unnaturals who feed on the pain of those they torture. But Nita has the ability to modify her body and make it immune to pain which means she is safe from this sociopathor is she?

I\’ve been reading the web comic version of this book, when I realised there was a book I bought it right away. I wasnt disappointed, dark, gritty and murky its fast paced and well worth reading

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