Reviewed by CJ | Rating: 2.5/5 | Steam: 🔥🔥🔥🔥 | 📱
⚠️ This is a full spoiler review. If you haven’t read Tallow and Bone yet — go read it first. We’ll be here when you’re done.
📣 Please be aware this book was released today, and this review will spoil it for you. Also be aware that there are a few key plot points that greatly affected my rating, not just the book as a whole.
OPENING HOOK
I’m a fast reader and I can usually finish a book in a day. Tallow and Bone took me well over a week, because I kept putting it down and having to talk myself back into it. I didn’t realize it was 777 pages until I was about 17% in and was wondering if we were going somewhere with the plot. I really enjoyed the book up until that point – the setting and events were written well, and I loved the relationships and personalities among the siblings, but it felt like it was moving so very slow. Which made more sense after learning the page count, because there are 777 pages to work with. There were a lot of things I loved about her earlier book, Bloody Black, so I was very excited to read this one, but I will be the first to admit that I was not the right reader for it. Please keep that in mind as you go through this review.
THE FULL STORY — SPOILERS INCLUDED
We open with Amity, who’s 23, kissing Thomas, an acquaintance in Boston. They’re friendly and experimenting so it’s nothing serious, but her magic moves the nearby blackberry vines to strangle him. She goes from laughing about the mistake to terrified when she realizes she can’t stop it, to her father being furious about having to hide a body while they’re already on the run from their comfortable life in England. It shows us that she can’t control her power, and gives us the reason the family has fled persecution Europe. They escape in the night just before the soldiers arrive, with Amity’s magic carpeting the forest floor in tree roots to cover their tracks. It’s chaotic and messy, but it works.
They’re separated from her mother who says to meet her in Salem as she runs off to find the sister they’ve lost in the escape. Amity, her other four siblings, and their father travel to Salem Village where they find the land is literally cursed. Nothing grows, everything is sick, neighbours are turning against neighbours, and people are starving. That tension leads to accused witches being executed, including Amity’s mother we see later, when Amity finds her hanging body. She doesn’t want to upset the delicate balance within her family, afraid they may leave before she can learn from other witches, so she keeps that her mother’s death to herself. Those other witches, Mary, Meg, and the masked man in the woods, are hopeful she will embrace her identity as a witch to help heal the town before the hysteria goes any further. She agrees so she can learn more from them while seeking revenge for her mother. The atmosphere was easily the best thing about this book for me – it’s set in a cold, creepy unforgiven cursed forest, and I could practically feel myself being watched, especially with the fall chill already in the air where I live.
Then we have the two main men. George Cartwright is sweet, with burns across his face and a deeply kind heart, and Steadfast Burgiss. Steadfast is George’s best friend, the Reverend’s son, the masked man in the woods, and a right proper dick to Amity from the start. He’s a dick to her until they bang, and then still a dick to her after that. Amity’s mother always told her to find a powerful witch to marry so their kids would be witchy, so she’s fixated on the man in the woods long before she learns he is Steadfast. Meanwhile she’s 23, which makes her a spinster to the townsfolk, so a marriage to George is all but forced on her; she goes through with it despite having sex with Steadfast just before the ceremony. He fucked her on her wedding day to his best friend, and continues to keep banging her enthusiastically, eventually leading to a pregnancy with Steadfast’s baby while still married to George, and it’s kind, caring George who supports her and the baby through postpartum depression. That man truly deserves the title of Saint George bestowed upon him by the two of them in the end. I’m furious on his behalf.
Eventually Amity poisons her sister because she’s been led to believe Elizabeth betrayed her, but it turns out not to be the truth and that oops gets kind of glossed over. In a final confrontation, while Elizabeth is inside dying, Amity learns that Steadfast has been the one cursing the land. His father the Reverend abused him and convinced him he accidentally killed his own mother with his powers. The Reverend screams that Steadfast is behind it all, and lists the people who’ve died because of him, Meg, Mary, George and Elizabeth, and Steadfast loses control to his rage. Amity steps in to calm his magic with hers, and under all her anger she gives in and tells him she still loves him. The Reverend gloats that all it ever took to control Steadfast was finding someone else he was afraid to lose (like his mother), and stupidly goes on to confess to killing her. As if that wasn’t enough, he keeps talking to reveal that he isn’t Steadfast’s biological father before he runs Stead through with a pitchfork. Amity puts everything she has into saving his life, and when they collect themselves to get up they see that the trees have strung the Reverend up and skewered him with their branches.
The curse has been lifted. They go back to George’s house for their daughter Clementine, noticing that green things are growing everywhere along the way. Steadfast tells her that George knew who and what she was from the very beginning, because Steadfast told him every single detail of their interactions, right from seeing her arrive on the carriage to having sex with her before the wedding. George loved her enough to let her have both of them, and he still ended up dead, having been executed by the townspeople he treated well. Amity and Stead burn his mask, and we’re taken three years into their future where they reach a clearing on the west coast to build their new home. In that time she has given birth to Amelia, George’s final gift to her before he died.
BEST PART OF THIS BOOK
- The atmosphere: the desperation of the townsfolk with winter coming and nothing growing, and something dark lurking in the woods. The way the author brilliantly sets the scene and writes the characters accounts for the few stars I did give it.
- The writing itself, and a cast of fascinating characters. I especially loved the relationship between the siblings in the beginning.
- George, easily my favourite character. His kindness stood out, and he was so damn fucking good to her despite me not thinking she deserved it one bit.
- The heart of it: Amity is desperate for the freedom to exist without fear of persecution, to be who she wants, and to use her magic and learn. Women in those times were treated as “less than” and a witch woman doubly so (ending in execution, ya know).
WORST PART OF THIS BOOK
- 777 pages that felt like it could have been much less, even after it finally got moving.
- No build-up between Amity and Steadfast. It’s push and pull and hot and cold, he rejects her, gives her a bit of attention and she just can’t seem to get enough. It was frustrating at best, and a giant flaming pile of red flags at worst.
- The cheating. I’m okay with a love triangle, but I can’t tolerate hurting someone that way. It’s despicable, not hot. The content warnings did indicate cheating, but silly me thought it may be a mistaken masked identity or some kind of situation out of their control. I somehow hadn’t considered purposeful continued cheating on an objectively good man that she was married to. That was my mistake there, but it’s a nope for me and it changed how I felt about her.
- Every person and every thing is beaten down. It’s cold and depressing, and the heartbreak never gets balanced out with hope or happiness. I didn’t feel any happiness reading this, and I have learned from this experience that I need at least a bit of that in my books.
- George’s death. That still pisses me off, sigh.
THE STEAM RATING BREAKDOWN
🔥🔥🔥🔥 Open door and explicit, with multiple scenes. The sex is front and center, since Amity, Steadfast and George are the bulk of the book.
Content warnings: persecution, witchcraft, religious trauma, abuse (child abuse off page, part of a couple of characters’ trauma), murder, hangings, executions, lechery (the Reverend), betrayal, cheating, postpartum depression. I really wish the cheating circumstances had been described in more detail in the warnings, because it would have changed my decision, but that’s not a reasonable expectation for me to have. I’m just irritated with myself for not being considering that fully before picking it up.
THE ENDING EXPLAINED — SATISFIED OR DISAPPOINTED?
Disappointed. Amity ends up with Steadfast, but she is clearly still deeply grieving George years later. Steadfast feels like the consolation prize; she’s not shy about showing it and he appears fully aware of it. It felt like a really shitty way to end the book, despite knowing that was the author’s intended. I would have preferred it if all three of them ended up together as a throuple, starting over in the new world, but as the great poet Mick Jagger once said, “we can’t always get what we want” (a big thank you to House, M. D. for that line).
WOULD WE REREAD IT?
No, I will not. It’s too heavy, too long and too much. I had more problems with it than appreciations.
CHARACTERS WE LOVED TO HATE
- The Reverend: despicable. He abused Steadfast, preys on young women, and murdered Steadfast’s mother.
- Steadfast: a massive dick who doesn’t want to settle down but also can’t leave Amity alone. I know he’s got trauma, but still.
- The town: neighbours turning on neighbour, and they’re the ones responsible for the death of innocents.
A MOMENT THAT STOOD OUT
The very end. Amity cries the whole way to the coast missing George, the man she mistreated and cheated on despite having his love and adoration. When they arrive to their new land, she’s still taking time away to sit and talk to him, and Steadfast is just there as the consolation prize. You keep thinking the book is going to redeem itself in some way, but it never does. It’s fucking awful for everybody and I feel crappier after having read it. Turns out that I escape our bleak and depressing reality by reading about other worlds, and I’ve now learned that I need them to have at least some good to balance out the bad. Again, probably my fault because I knew there wasn’t going to be a typical happily ever after, but I wasn’t expecting this level of bleakness either.
WHO IS THIS FOR
Not sure. People who love having their hearts ripped out and stomped on and never put back together might find that this one is where it’s at?
WHERE TO GET THIS BOOK
📖 Physical Book
Amazon US | Amazon CA | Bookshop.org
🎧 Audiobook
No audiobook available — not on Audible or Libro.fm.
Ready for more reviews from CJ? Find More Here
Plot Twisted. 🔥
📱 | Series: Standalone | Genre: Historical Fantasy | Steam: 🔥🔥🔥🔥
TAGS: Tallow and Bone, Rhiannon Hargadon, Salem Witch Trials retelling, Historical Fantasy, Witch Books, Love Triangle, Open Door Romance, Standalone, Full Spoiler Review, October reads, New Release, Love Triangle, Cheating, Witchcraft, Religious Trauma, Ending Explained, Does Amity end up with,