Hello hello everyone! I’m back again with another review on this Juneteenth day. I do hope if you get the day off, you’re able to enjoy it with those you love, and if you don’t have it off, that the day goes quickly and smoothly for you. Now, onto the review!
Sofi and the Bone Song by Adrienne Tooley
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Alright, this book is part of a Traveling Book Project that I’m taking part in on Tumblr, and this was chosen by someone else. And what’s great about Traveling Book Projects, is that you get to read books that are not what you would normally read. And this is definitely one that I wouldn’t normally read, but I still enjoyed this book. It’s about a world where the use of magic is forbidden, and music is only allowed to be played by a select few. Sofi, our main character, is the daughter of a Musik, one of only five people who are allowed to play an instrument and create original music. And these Musiks are only allowed to take on one apprentice to train to take on their mantel. Sofi has been training her whole life in order to take up this apprenticeship and to eventually take up her father’s mantel as Musik.
At the auctions though, another tries out without having ever played a lute before, and she plays in such a way that charms all of the judges. This newcomer is chosen to take the spot Sofi had been training for her whole life, and she is bitter. Which, wouldn’t you be? Soon after though, Sofi’s father dies, and his apprentice takes on his title of Musik, and Sofi is ready to chew through iron. And because Lara, newest Musik and “stealer” of Sofi’s position, asks for Sofi’s help as she now has to make her traveling tour around the kingdom, stopping in each new place with a new song prepped to play and sing each night.
While I don’t go for young adult romances much any more, the romance did take a back seat in this book, going more for the growth that both characters go through in order to not only learn more about each other, but Sofi specifically learning more about her past and her parents, and what certain secrets revealed will mean not only for her, but for Lara as well. And I like that we can see Sofi struggling to learn how to let go of her one “dream,”(I am putting in quotations, because her father most definitely steered her towards this goal all her life) in order to help another. And you can see this struggle kind of personified in Lara, the one that Sofi now has to help, even though Lara took the one thing Sofi really “dreamed” about becoming.
Towards the end of the book there are revelations, and secrets that start to breathe in the light of day, in the dead of winter, and Sofi does have to take a good long look at her life and the memories of her father, and what it all actually means for Sofi. How she will work with these secrets and what will she do with the knowledge now made known to her? What do you think of young adult romances? What makes them a good one?
Tiny Navajo Reads 