Kadomi@buecher.pnpde.social reviewed The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
A creepy extension of the Mitchellverse
5 stars
I don't know, there's no book of David Mitchell I haven't loved. They aren't perfect, some stuff really weirds me out hardcore, but they're always fascinating. The Bone Clocks fits that scheme as well.
The Bone Clocks covers a timeline of the mid-80s to the year 2043. We get a total of five different PoV characters, and every story shares that it's about the first point of view character, Holly Sykes. Holly heard 'radio voices' as a child but was cured of that by a Chinese doctor. As a teenager she runs away from home because of a tosser boyfriend, and has some kind of supernatural event occur. She eventually finds out that her precocious younger brother Jacko has disappeared.
Over the course of the other stories, we find out that Jacko never re-appeared, that Holly turns into a famous author writing about the voices in her head, and that …
I don't know, there's no book of David Mitchell I haven't loved. They aren't perfect, some stuff really weirds me out hardcore, but they're always fascinating. The Bone Clocks fits that scheme as well.
The Bone Clocks covers a timeline of the mid-80s to the year 2043. We get a total of five different PoV characters, and every story shares that it's about the first point of view character, Holly Sykes. Holly heard 'radio voices' as a child but was cured of that by a Chinese doctor. As a teenager she runs away from home because of a tosser boyfriend, and has some kind of supernatural event occur. She eventually finds out that her precocious younger brother Jacko has disappeared.
Over the course of the other stories, we find out that Jacko never re-appeared, that Holly turns into a famous author writing about the voices in her head, and that there are two factions at war. One of them calls regular people Bone Clocks, hence the title.
The different chapters feel like vignettes, different styles, different personalities, but they all have this common red thread in them, with the supernatural events, with a generous dollop of post-apocalypse in the final chapter. I love sci-fi and fantasy, so I embraced those elements, but it's possible other readers won't.
What I probably love best about the Mitchell books is to sit down afterwards and find all easter eggs, characters and hints from previous books, and I think I found something from every work so far, even number9dream.
