Sadly, I had a very negative experience with this author and I will not be reviewing her books now or in the future. Being rude to reviewers/social media influencers is not the way to go.

First of all, WHY ARE MORE PEOPLE NOT TALKING ABOUT THIS BOOK?!?!?!?!?!?!??!?

I frequently listen to people discuss what books are most disturbing in the horror and dark fantasy genres. I am always looking for a new and unique horror read. Much to my surprise, I have not heard one person mention this book. To be honest, I have never read a Young Adult book like this one. I don't know if I would even classify this book as Young Adult because it is pretty graphic. All of that being said, I REALLY liked it!!! My mind is still trying to process the world this author has created. It took me a little bit to get into the story. There are so many unnatural creatures to keep track of with names I have never heard. Also, the author jumps right into the story, so I was confused sometimes. Don't worry though, I will be reading the rest of the trilogy. I HAVE TO KNOW!!! Be warned, it is technical, gory, gross, and extremely disturbing. On the other hand, it is a fascinating story with morally gray characters who are pushed to make decisions they never see themself having to make. It will make you question if you would have reacted the same way.

This book definitely took me by surprise! I was surprised by how much I loved it! It’s definitely got a Dexter type of feel!

Nita listens to her Disney playlist while she dissects dead unnatural beings. She lives with her mother and helps her with the collecting and dissecting that she does for a living. Nita’s mother sells body parts on the black market on the dark web. The first chapter shows her cruelty when she brings home a creature that looks like he’s an eighteen-year-old human. She locks him in a newly purchased cage and handcuffs him. She wants to keep him alive as long as possible while she removes and sells pieces of his body. Nita can’t stand to see him suffer so she helps him escape. Her mother is furious but calm. Soon after, Nita is kidnapped and imprisoned. After witnessing torture and seeing some black market buyers, Nita manages to escape and takes her neighboring cellmate along. Through suspenseful danger and action, Nita discovers more information about her kidnapping. Twists and intrigue, 4 stars!

This was a middle-of-the-road read for me. While I liked a lot of aspects, there were some things I disliked, and overall, I just didn't feel strongly enough about the book to really warrant adding an in-depth review to the blog.

YA horror is a genre that often seems to get glossed over, so it was great to get my hands on this one. I was not disappointed by the level of darkness here--Schaeffer does not hold back from putting our main character, Nita, into morally ambiguous situations that definitely let her toe the line between hero and villain. This book is a twisty, deliciously dark addition to the genre and I look forward to starting the sequel.

I looooooooved this so much and thought it was just as interesting and kept me on the edge of my seat as I was hoping it would be. I will be buying this and its sequel for my friends and family

I loved this book! It’s deliciously dark and twisted, and features a cast of antiheroes and villains that are flawed and complex. The plot is fast-paced and thrilling with the stakes building up to a climax that leaves the readers on a nail biting cliffhanger. While there isn’t what I’d call romance in this book, the chemistry between Nita and Kovit is one of the elements I loved most about this story. There’s nothing else quite like it in YA and I’m eager to read the next chapter in Nita’s journey!

A thoroughly original take on old mystical concepts. Rebecca Schaeffer revived old ideas and creatures and spun a gorgeous tale of strength, character, and magic.

So first off, I'm kicking myself right now for waiting so long to read this.  Secondly huge shout out to HMH for providing me this ARC in 2018.

Basically everything about this book — from the cover to the tag line — screamed THIS IS FOR ME!  It did not disappoint.  It was fresh, exciting, and darkly fascinating!

Not Even Bones provides a lot of dark, morally questionable characters all of which deal directly or indirectly with torture, murder, and/or dissection of unnaturals.  As the story unfolds you realize in this world not all "bad" people are created the same.  

You have Nita, an anti-social teenager, who has spent her childhood dissecting and prepping the body parts of "monsters" for the black market.  Eventually Nita finds herself on the other side of the dark market after being kidnapped by someone wanting to exploit her abilities.  Here she meets Kovit, a Zannie, who inflicts pain on others to eat but has rules that prevent him from taking it too far.  Their unlikely friendship, turned slow burn romance, is everything.  And the duo eventually takes on the isolated Peruvian dark market to regain their freedom.

Can't wait to get my hands on a copy of Only Ashes Remain to see how the story continues.  If you haven't read this one, do yourself a favor and PICK IT UP!

I finished this title but am choosing not to do a full review. I don't know how I feel about the book. Was it good? Was it bad? I'm just not sure. So I will settle on a 3-star rating and choose not to review since I don't have anything useful to add to the conversation.

Goodreads Status Updates
June 28, 2018 – Finished Reading
June 22, 2018 –
55.0% "This book is so gritty and a bit grisly! The comparison to Dexter is very appropriate. I'm not even sure I like the main character."
June 15, 2018 –
39.0% "This is a dark read so far, lots of gory details and awful things happening. It reminds me of a criminal minds episode."

4.5 This is a great book for suspense readers who may not realize they do like horror books. The suspenseful storyline is highly engaging and moves readers easily through even gory scenes. Great readalike for fans of Shusterman's Unwind or Scythe. Looking forward to the sequel!

Based on the book’s description, I wasn’t sure about Not Even Bones. Let’s be real: there’s no romance in that description, and it’s also pretty low on details about the book’s actual plot. I was on the fence about requesting it, and I was probably swayed by the lovely and creepy cover. For those on the fence, the Dexter meets This Savage Song pitch is actually right on the money. Schaeffer’s debut is dark, creepy, murdery and unputdownable.


When the book started, I was immediately into the creepy nature of it. Nita works for her mom, as a fair amount of teens do. Nita dissects and dismembers supernatural beings for her mom, which not very many teens probably do, even in this fantasy version of the world where supernatural creatures are common. Nita super loves her job too, even if she has to pretend she doesn’t know how the sausage is made to do it.

When her mom brings home a helpless supernatural creature with yummy flesh, Nita balks at the idea of slowly cutting pieces off of a live victim for sale. Nita’s as shocked as anyone else to realize that she does have an ethical line. (This, right here, should let you know what kind of a heroine you have in this book.) At this point, I thought I knew where the book was going, and I was suspicious, but the book super did not go where I thought it would, and it was AWESOME. I was on the edge of my seat for all 368 pages.

What I loved most about Not Even Bones is that it absolutely leans into the darkness and horror. There are so many YA novels where the characters are monstrous but then you find out that they’re misunderstood fluffy bunnies. No one in here is a fluffy bunny. This book is thoroughly populated by terrifying people, and no one is to be underestimated. I can’t pick scariest, though Nita’s mother is a definite contender for that. Probably at least half of the cast has antisocial personality disorder (think psychopaths/sociopaths). I kept expecting there to be some sort of redemption arc or softening, but this book keeps its teeth from beginning to end.

The range of supernatural creatures is really cool, pulling from legends around the world, I’d imagine. I’d never read about any creatures like most of the ones mentioned in this book, and the ones I had (like vampires) were still completely different from anything I’d encountered before. Nita (and her mother’s power) was especially fascinating. They can manipulate their bodies by altering their biology, but they’re limited by what the body can scientifically do, which is so cool and also I can only imagine how useless that power would be on me because if you don’t understand the biology you can easily kill yourself.

There’s a real visual element to this novel. It’s one of those that even I kind of saw play out in my head like a film. Only some authors make that happen for me, but there’s something really graphic about the writing style that paints a word picture. What’s interesting is the writing was one of the things I was initially unsure about, but it clearly did its job for the story.

I’ll keep this review on the short side, because there’s very little I feel I can talk about without spoiling the twists and turns this incredibly dark story takes, and I’d hate to do that to anyone. This is a book for readers who indulge in the macabre and want to hang out with a heroine who enjoys cutting up dead bodies.

What a crazy, creepy ride! Nita's mother hunts and kills all sorts of creatures, from vampires to unicorns, and then Nita cuts up the bodies of those magical creatures for her mother to sell on the black market. What makes it creepy is that those creatures all look (mostly) like people. Even creepier is when it looks like Nita's mother decides to sell HER on the black market, just for disobeying and losing her mother a big sale. Nita must find a way to escape the Death Market, but it she willing to kill to save her own life? Does that make her more of a monster or more human than she thought she was?

Violent, creepy, with moral greyness and profanity. Not for squeamish or those unprepared for the darkness inside.

Deliciously dark and twisty! This title asks complex questions about good and evil, encouraging readers to see the intersections and ambiguity of morality. Perfect for readers of horror who want a fresh twist on urban fantasy!

This book was completely different than anything I’ve read lately, or maybe ever. It’s the story of Nita, a girl who has grown up working in the family business. Only this family business is much darker than normal; they capture magical creatures and dissect them in order to sell their parts on the black market. And Nita is the one doing the dissecting. But she doesn’t murder them, her piece in the business is methodical and precise and has never bothered. That is of course until her mother brings home a live person for Nita to dissect. In her effort to do the right thing and release the man, Nita herself is sold on the black market and gets to see her world from a much different angle.

This book gets DARK. So if you aren’t ready for that, or for slightly gruesome dissections, maybe skip it. But, dark is kind of my thing and though some things made me a bit squeamish, I still really loved where Rebecca Schaeffer went with this book. It brings up questions like, what does it mean to be a human? As well as lots of other social commentary sprinkled throughout.

This is very much a story where the main character walks the line between hero and villain. Nita is fantastic and I loved being inside her head. I’ve heard Not Even Bones pitched as Dexter meets This Savage Song and I couldn’t think of a better way to describe it. It just so perfectly encapsulates the darkness of humans and what we choose to do with it.

This book was… a ride. I knew going in that it was going to be a dark and twisted but then my first thought was “How dark can it get, really?”. Very dark, past Fadwa. Very very dark. And I was a huge fan of that about the book. Seeing how many of my friends were huge fans of this book, I had high expectations for it, and content Wise, it did live up to every one of them, and even exceeded them, that being said, I had a few issues I just couldn’t get past.

My main issue with Not Even Bones was the writing, and it’s 100% subjective but I just couldn’t get into it. no matter how thrilling the events were, I just was too disconnected from the narration to feel any of it properly. and it also made me feel as if the book was taking me forever to finish (It was only 5 days) and that it was slow which makes absolutely no sense because objectively speaking, it was the farthest thing from slow or even boring. I knew I probably make no sense but I really can’t pinpoint what about the writing style didn’t work for me, I just know I struggled with it.

There was also this thing that rubbed me the wrong way a few times in the book, and it’s the stigmatizing of sociopaths. Sociopathy as a mental illness is largely misunderstood so the fact that the author plastered the label on every villaineous character (which, let’s be honest, is every character) sucked and further stigmatized it, and it was used in the wrong context and to describe the wrong set of personality traits and behavioral patterns, which showed that the author herself, misunderstands it.

Now that that’s out of the way, I absolutely loved the worldbuilding in this book, and I mean WORLDbuilding, not USbuilding. Let me explain myself: in most urban fantasy books centering American main characters, the worldbuilding and existence of supernatural and mystical creatures somehow stops at the borders of the US so imagine my surprise when I discovered that 1/ the book is set in Peru and not the US, and 2/ the wordbulding expands to all parts of the world. The author took time and care to mention creatures from all kinds of countries and I really appreciated that.

Another thing I liked was the underlying social commentary that the authors sprinkles all throughout the book without it even being too obvious, especially when it comes to Anglophone countries’ entitlement and superiority complex, as well as their colonization and oppression of other countries all throughout history up until present day.

Not Even Bones is gorey and not afraid to go into the darkest, cruelest depths of human existence and that’s what I loved about it the most, it doesn’t just proclaim itself dark, it actually shows it is. Every single character we meet in the book is a villain with a broken moral compass, yes, even the main character. Moreover, this book is so freaking original, I’ve never read anything quite like it before, explaining supernatural creatures through science, putting a twist on them, even the most popular ones (vampires, unicorns, etc…) and bringing Something entirely new to the YA table.

We follow Nita, the MC, whose mom is white American and dad is Chilean, as she goes from dissecting unnaturals to the one being dissected to be sold on the body market. She’s smart, cunning, pragmatic and highly selfish, which I loved, because when you write a villain as a protagonist, you might as well go all the way. She puts herself first and doesn’t back down in the face or anything to get her freedom and I admire that the author, like we say, DID THAT. As the book progresses, we see her slowly come to term with her villaineous nature as she stops rationalizing her actions and questions everything she’s ever told herself…about herself.
All in all, plot wise, Not Even Bones was absolutely brilliant, especially with the way it ended and I won’t let the things that I didn’t enjoy about it stop me from getting to the sequel, because I’m very excited to see where things are headed.

Disturbing, morbid, and utterly fascinating, Not Even Bones was not the book I expected but everything I could have asked for nonetheless.

There are dark YA novels, and then there's this book. It's not scary or creepy, not a thriller to keep you up at night, but it's so very dark. Nita, the protagonist, dissects "people," creatures that resemble humans a little too closely for comfort. And from there, it just gets grittier.

First off, I loved that this book isn't set in the US but in Peru. I feel like all the books I've read lately set in our world are in either the US or UK so I enjoyed the change. And this world is messed up. It's an alternate universe where many of the various supernatural creatures you've probably heard about (vampires, unicorns, etc) and others you haven't exist in a sort-of peace with humans. Except for the ones Nita and her mother kill and dismantle to sell for parts.

This book seriously challenges morality and falls almost entirely into that gray area. Nita is a character that I both wanted to see a redemption arc for after all the things she's done or been a part of, but I also didn't because that was who she was. In short, I found her character entirely fascinating. She's neither hero nor villain. Honestly, while there are a few characters who would definitely fall firmly in the "villain" category, I wouldn't classify any of them as heroes.

Nita is selfish, naturally so I would say. One thing I've never understood in stories, especially YA, are the heroes who are purely selfless and will do whatever they can for the greater good. Not that those types of people don't exist, but it doesn't seem realistic to have a whole cast of them. Nita helps others, sure, but she also ensures her own safety in the process.

Also, I love Kovit. I can't say more, but his character is very much multi-faceted and just so beautifully flawed. Much like Nita.

I just love Nita and her character development. It was so masterfully done. I just. Yeah.

And this WORLD. Okay, so I mentioned that it's set in Peru. In the middle of the jungle. In a market. The Death Market. I never thought I'd find a fictional world I wanted to visit less than Panem from The Hunger Games but I think I found it. If you're human, you're fine. But if there's even something remotely different about you, best to run FAR, far away. I had no problems envisioning the setting which, kudos to Schaeffer for the excellent writing, not so great for my psyche. It's messed up.

This book is messed up.

And I loved it!

As for the writing, because I suppose I should mention that, I wouldn't necessarily call Schaeffer the best of the best with this debut. But hey, it's a debut. And, frankly, I didn't care. I was hooked from the first word to the last (and I NEED the sequel).

If you've been on the hunt (hah. . . ) for a dark, gritty YA fantasy packed with so many plot twists I thought I was on a roller coaster, Not Even Bones is your book. Or if you like morally gray characters. Or something spooky for the Halloween season. Or just want to read a good book? 

You get the picture. Read this book. Buy this book. Request it from your library. /End Rave

Nita's family isn't like everyone else's--unless their family also sells the body parts of supernaturals on the black market. Nita's mother hunts and kills the supernaturals, and Nita dissects them. Then they send the parts for sale.

When Nita's mother brings one home alive, it's a bridge too far for Nita. Suddenly, it brings home what it is they actually do. Their subjects have lives. After Nita helps him escape, she finds out what life is like for the hunted supernaturals when she herself is captured--after all, she's secretly a supernatural herself.

Schaeffer creates an interesting and full world of supernaturals and a dark underground. Nita is an interesting character, and the world inventive enough to encourage me to try the next in the series when it comes out.

NOT EVEN BONES doesn't shy away from the blood, guts, and torture. There are multiple scenes where, if this book were a movie, I'd be shying away from the screen. Readers looking for a little Dexter in their lives may be pleased by the bloodiness of NOT EVEN BONES. However, content warnings include: torture, blood, cannibalism, murder, mentions of suicide, and all around gore.

Wielding a scalpel and walking a morally grey line, Nita is a delightful character. I also enjoyed the side characters, who were just enough developed that I cared whether they lived or died. However, I thought the pacing of this novel suffered a little in that there's barely any action--besides the torture--until the final chapters.

The ending is also abrupt; although, my expectations might have been different if I went into NOT EVEN BONES aware that it's part of an unnamed (as of writing this review) planned series. I'm not sure how else Nita can get her hands bloody, but there are some threads either quickly summed up or left hanging in those final chapters.