If you know me and my reading tastes, you know that I will read any and all books that involve necromancy or bone magic. Fall is slowly creeping up on us – very slowly, in my case (desert life…). And obviously necromancy and bone magic are both pretty spooky! So I decided to compile a short list of books that involve one or the other! I bet you can guess one or two of the ones I’m going to include haha. Read on to see if you guessed correctly!

I saw my friend Kori do this on her bookstagram, so I thought I’d do the same thing here! If you want to see her post, you can find it here. Thanks for sharing that Kori ❤️. Here is a preview of some of the books that I’ll be talking about!

The Happy Place 5 is a monthly series where a few friends and I post 5 of our favorites books for a certain topic or theme. The name is from a Discord group that I am a part of. We created the space to have a positive environment for a handful of close friends. All of us are bookworms, and many of us are bookstagrammers and bloggers. So we decided to start a blog post series together! I’ll link my friends blogs and posts for this month’s topic at the end of this post.

So apparently May 15th was International Day of Families. NATURALLY this means that we had to pick found family as our Happy Place 5 topic this month! You (probably) already know that I’m a huge sucker for found family. Luckily, my friends are as well so we are all very happy to have this as our topic this month haha. As you may have noticed, I am posting this month’s post on the last day of the month. May has been kind of a hard month for me, so I haven’t been able to do much blogging. But I did want to share my choices with you!! Since I don’t have much energy I’m just going to post the Goodreads summary for each book, but I really hope you check them all out. So what are my choices??

Thank you Harper Voyager for providing me with an eARC for review via NetGalley!

When I heard about this book, I immediately put it on my TBR for two reasons. One being that synopsis – I mean the good guy potentially going bad for love? And five warriors who saved the world have to reunite?? Yes. Dear god yes. The second reason was the author. I read the Queens of Renthia trilogy by Sarah Beth Durst a few years ago and LOVED it, so I was definitely excited to read more from her. That trilogy had such cool magic, and a mom as a main character! I really love seeing older protagonists, so I was excited that this one also feature a group of older heroes.

If you have read any of my blog posts, you probably know what I’m going to mention first about this book. Yes! That’s right! FOUND FAMILY!!!!! Let’s go baby!!!! I think the cool thing about this one was that we don’t actually get to see how they all came together, because that’s in the past. However! We get to see how their relationships with one another have evolved, and just how strong found family ties can be. I like that Durst didn’t make it easy for them to all reconnect, because obviously over 25 years people have changed a LOT.

Another thing I love: the bone magic. Yeah it’s a little creepy, but it’s also so cool!!!! Like enchanting specific bones from different animals to enhance specific traits? So awesome. If that doesn’t make sense, then think like, using bear bones for strength/stability, or cheetah bones for speed, etc. And also being able to read the future in bones? Terrifying but awesome. I kinda do wish we could have seen a bit more of the magic, but maybe that’s just me being magic greedy haha.

To be honest, reviews are kind of hard for me right now so I don’t have much more to say. But just know that this is definitely one of my favorites of the year. The adventures! The magic! The found family! And also that villain!!!! He was very well done. I also just really like the concept of this book, i.e. dealing with what could happen after the heroes save the world. So yes, I hope you go pick it up and see for yourself!