#twelve Bones

[funkyboxofinterests]

I’ve had the most specific reading experience with books lately

[shxpeshifterr]

[ven10]

oohh okay i just now saw that one ship bingo ask game you reblogged weeks ago, so! cleo knight/jake hix? and/or: cleo knight/lizzie haines? up to you. :)

Hi Vivid! 👋💜 (I filled the board for Cleo/Jake :)! )

I like Cleo+Jake’s relationship, I think they go well together but I’m very neutral about the romantic aspect of it tbh. Also I recently read a book called ‘Twelve bones’ and the relationship between 2 characters in it reminded me SO MUCH of Cleo+Jake!! Bc in it there was Mitch (a kind teenage chef with parents who don’t care about him at all) (Like Jake!! -saying his parents don’t care given they straight up abandoned him in Stain’d) and Leonie (a fashionable academically bright teenage girl)(like Cleo!) :)

[average-star-enjoyer]

that’s on having an obsessive fixation on a series for a week!!!! IM SO HAPPYYY

[magicalyaku]

Hello and welcome to another reading year! Following the devastation Dark Heir cause in my heart at the end of 2023, I didn't really feel like reading much for about two weeks. I did catch up on a few manga series, most notably 8 volumes of Yona of the Dawn by Mizuho Kusanagi. While it's still very good, I think binge reading helped quite a bit to keep me invested. :'D After that, I read one book that will definitely go into my worst books of 2024. Refer to the later half of the post if you want to know more. Let's focus on the good ones first!

Cursebreakers (Madeleine Nakamura): This one was really good! I was positively surprised. The world is magical, not medieval but futuristic! The story around the conspiracy is interesting and intense and the main characters are difficult people that might be hard to like in real life but they complement each other so well and it's so nice to see their relationship grow (no love story here!). I also really liked the way it is told. The protagonist has bipolar disorder which is a huge factor in the story but he recounts the story from a later perspective, so rather than being right in the moment with every dramatic and sometimes questionable decision we get a little bit of distance and insight into his actions and thoughts which works really well.

Twelve Bones (Sixteen Souls 2) (Rosie Talbot): The first volume was a already a little dark but all the bad stuff involved a limited circle of people (most of them ghosts), this one takes a full dive into the swooping dark threatening the entire city, living and dead! The stakes, my dear. Ugh! Based on that I wouldn't call it fun ... would I? I liked reading it, though! The cast of characters is really endearing. The story is good. The struggle felt warranted. The ending is kinda mangaesque but I like manga, so I don't mind. xD I wonder if there'll be a third volume. If not, I'll look forward to the author's next work. :)

The Necromancer's Light (Radiance 1) (Tavia Lark): I picked up the set of the trilogy which has a much better cover than the indivual books. :'D This one is very simple and straightforward, it's cute. The characters are likable. The hurt/comfort in here is indeed comforting. I think I like the first part with the pining best. This story's animal is a horse! (I read half of the auther's Perilous Courts series and there's friendly animals in every volume there as well. Nice touch.)

And now for the first book of 2024 I did not like. Heir to Thorn and Flame (Court of Broken Bonds 1) (Ben Alderson): I read the author's self-published Darkmourn series last summer and quite liked it despite its issues with the writing. Now this one has a tradtional publisher so I wanted to know if that made any difference. On a whole, the writing feels a little bit smoother than Darkmourn. But it's still long, repetetive, and tries to hard to sound fancy by exaggerating a lot. The premise of the story isn't even that bad. Boy finds out he has magic, accidentely kills the prince, has to take his place and political stuff occurs with two countries on the cusp of war over him and his magic. The first thing that annoyed me: The story feels unnecessarily cruel. It literally starts out with attempted rape which is already the second time protagonist Maxiumus is assaulted in his life. People are killed right in front of him, he is forced to shoot someone he cares for. People violently dig through his memories and still don't believe his story afterwards. And the villains are just caricatures. They have the balding hair, yellowed teeth, bony fingers, stinky breath, and leering eyes. They're ugly and evil! It was so over the top that I couldn't care at all. The other characters have nothing going on for them either. I don't like Maximus at all. He's whiny and indecisive and only worries about his parents. He does have that superstrong magic he uses to rip people apart when he's angry, wow. He also has two love interests and I don't see the chemistry with either of them (I suppose it tries to be Slow Burn but not very good). But they're so good-looking, the strong arms and nice smell, so tall! (eyeroll) The second one of these guys is named Simion. He's the only one remotely nice to him in the beginning, so Maximus likes him. Then he hates him. Then he likes him, then Simion reveals stuff and Maximus hates him again (even though he's just the messenger). But then he's suddenly attracted to him again to the point they even kiss … but oh no, Maximus can't kiss anyone, because he is married to the other guy by magic (against his will)!! And everyone treats it as this big thing "oh old magic you are bound to each other now for life" etc, but nobody explains what the handfastening (as they call it) even does for 80% of the book! Until Maximus kisses Simion and the magic causes him pain because he's cheating!!

Here my mind went on a tangent. The magic seems to have a conscious in this story, alright, but I want to know it's moral values then. Does it only detect kisses and sex? Physical acts? Can it differentiate between consensual und non-consensual? Who is doing the touching? Does is only clock sexual attraction or romantic attraction as well? What if he has a crush and never acts on it? Would it still cause him permament pain? What's with platonical kisses? Now you ask, do we have to explain all of this in a book like this? No, we don't (there's also two sequels), but I sure hope the author thought about it when he introduced a complex thing like this. Oh, also Simion forces his way into Maximus's mind via telepathy several times. Such a nice way to get to know each other. And speaking of the morality of the magic, it counts how many people are killed with it. On the wand. As tally marks. How does it know? Why does it only count humans, not animals? Why does it care?

Two more things I found annoying (there's more, but this is long enough already): First, the parents. Everything happening in the story hinges on their whereabouts, it's back and forth and very tiring. The Red King has them so Maximus has to stay with him, then the Blue Prince has them, then they get kidnapped so Maximus follows, then it turns out they've never been kidnapped and the Blue Prince kept them all along! In between he freaks out over his father not being his father and when they're reunited, but before they can talk, the father dies. Yay. Tragic. Not. The same thing happened before already. The one lady Maximus was forced to kill? She survived! She was saved and he goes to meet her, they talk for 30 seconds and then she's eaten by a dragon. :D I was pissed for wasting my time.

Which is a sentiment I kind of share about the whole book, but also not. It made me angry but sometimes it's good to have an outlet for the rage. :'D

[childofhermessss]

thats it I'm making an au

I won't post alot about this book because my hyperfixactions are the Riordan verse, anything horror related and Stranger things but in sixteen souls we get introduced to a boy named Mitch and I fall in love with his character immediately and he becomes my favourite character. And then in the sequel - twelve Bones - HE FUCKING DIED and he can't come back as a ghost unlike most souls. But souls can be reincarnated so I'm now making an au where Charlie (Protagonist of both books) gets a younger brother who shares similar interests and features only Mitch had. Because it's Mitch reincarnated. That's all have a great day

[sixteen-souls]

[SPOILERS FOR ‘TWELVE BONES’]Hc that post-canon, once the group has moved into the new house Sam bought, Sam paints a family portrait of them all together so that the ghosts can be included too…but he also adds Mitch to it, so that he’s still there, even if he never got the chance to actually live there with them💜

[jruthphipps]

Sixteen Souls and Twelve Bones by Rosie Talbot

[dasiesanddarkness]

okay yeah so to everyone who forgot (because it's really only mentioned like twice in the books) Kaz has an R tattooed on his arm. for Jordie. and his dad. he changed his name and tried to forget about his family but he couldn't. he still had to get that tattoo as a tribute to the people who raised him, who loved him and were so very important to him. the rest of the world will never remember the Rietvelds, but that's okay because they will always be with Kaz, tattooed on his arm.

[saguaroooo]

Grumpy on the verge of crazy x elegant/calm that is actually a looser x hot person used for fanservice must be my favorite ship dynamic

[shxpeshifterr]

[ven10]

Picrews of the main living characters from the sixteen soul series 👻 (Charlie, Sam, Leonie+Mitch) :)

[annebrontefanclub]

Look.

This is the MOST important thing.

[the-bi-fangirl-biatch]

if i had a nickel for every time i shipped:

a man that's an impossibly old creature that has a dark past and deals with problems in a harsher way than usual due to understandable circumstances and who is highly competent and charismatic (and who has a soft spot for dogs),

with a younger woman who is just new to the world of adventuring with (literal and figurative) wide eyes and a softer heart than most and who is skilled in her own way but grows to make the tough decisions in the end,

and they're both narrative foils of one another, both morphing into a little bit of each other....

AND the antis are calling it a father-daughter relationship

I'd have two nickels. Which isn't much, but it's weird thay it happened twice.

[childofhermessss]

WHY DOES NOBODY TALK ABOUT THAT ONE QUICK LINE IN TWELVE BONES WITHIN THE FIRST 7-8 PAGES!?!

please its so dumb but so funny at the same time 😭

'last week the ghost of a local tradesmen surprised me in the public looks and demanded I leave a positive review on his sons trust-a-trader profile. He wouldn't take "not while I'm having a piss mate" for an answer'

THATS SO UNHINGED IM SORRY WHAT 😭

[sixteen-souls]

One of my favourite parts of the sixteen souls series (by Rosie Talbot) is seeing the reactions of random side characters witnessing the main characters in the depth of invisible troubles.

Like that scene (in 12 bones) when Sam+his mum r having this really dramatic+emotional fight in the hotel lobby which, to the employees must have sounded INSANE bc imagine ur just doing ur job +overhear a convo that goes something like this

Sam’s mum: Your father is ‼️BEYOND THE VEIL‼️, dear, that 🔮nice psychic woman🔮 told me about it, he is CALLING to us and we must ⚡️listen⚡️ 🗣️

Sam: No, mum, he isn’t talking, he’s dead.😔.

Sam’s mum: Don’t be dense, darling, I paid £1000 for this knowledge 🙄

Bc at the start the hotel staff probably felt really bad for Sam- I mean the guy is full-on living in that hotel , it’s clear he doesn’t have a stable home. And of course overhearing his conversation with his mother they’d feel even worse. But. Then Sam pulls shit like asking for as much salt as the hotel HAS and they conclude that nobody in that family is Normal. Imagine going to clean a room+ finding a SALT CIRCLE on the ground+ a bunch of glyphs drawn in various notebooks- I’m very very curious as to what conclusions the hotel staff drew about the Harrow family 🤔… especially after the news report about the incident at the psychic show in the theatre��😬😀