V. E. Schwab’s Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil seems to be marketed to readers of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue rather than readers of her YA novels. I am not a fan of Schwab’s YA novels, and I loved The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, so my expectation was that Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil would be a slam dunk for me, but as interesting as I found the novel’s setting, the story ended up falling flat.

Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil is a story that spans centuries and is told from the perspectives of three different women. It begins in Spain in the 1500s with Maria, a beautiful woman with fiery red hair who longs for freedom. In order to escape the small town that she grew up in, Maria catches the attention of a wealthy landowner who makes her his wife, and she finds herself in a different kind of prison where her jealous husband will not allow her to leave home. When a mysterious woman offers Maria the opportunity to live a different kind of life, Maria seizes upon it – and is turned into a vampire. Thus begins Maria’s centuries long existence of doing as she pleases, and not caring at all about the people that she kills as she feeds from them.

The story then jumps into the future, to 2019 and Alice, a young woman who is unmoored in life after a tragic loss that is hinted at throughout the novel but does not take much effort to figure out. Alice is from Ireland and attending Harvard University in Boston. She tends to keep to herself, but when her roommates convince to go out to a party, she meets an enigmatic woman with purple hair named Lottie. Alice and Lottie spend the night together, and when Alice wakes up the next morning, Lottie is gone, and she feels sick. The sunlight bothers her, she cannot keep food down, and then she attacks a fellow student. Alice is lucky to have knowledge of vampire lore so she can figure out for herself that she has been turned into a vampire, and she assumes that Lottie is the one who turned her. Extremely pissed about being made a vampire (as one should be), Alice is determined to track Lottie down and make her pay.

Lottie, who was made a vampire in 1800s London, is the third perspective of the story but I am not going to say much more about her because the reader is meant to piece together her role in the novel as both Maria’s and Alice’s stories progress.

Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil is historical fiction with a supernatural twist like The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue and I love how Schwab has created a world that is so richly imagined that it came alive in my mind. But I had this unsettling realization as I read about Maria drinking her way through Europe that vampires are not the sexy beings depicted in The Vampire Dairies, Twilight or the Sookie Stackhouse books; they are actually terrible monsters who kill people or turn people into vampires without their consent. That’s growth, people.

Now that I’ve finished Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, I have spent some time pondering what is the point of it. It is a story about women finding their freedom, but at the cost of their humanity. You might initially feel sympathetic towards Maria when she realizes after her marriage that she does not actually have any control over her own life, but make no bones about it, she is the villain of the story as she leaves her role as the oppressed behind and becomes the oppressor. Honestly all I got from this novel is that women can be just as shitty to each other as men are to women, which I already knew, but it sucks to read about two protagonists that both turn out to be terrible and the third one is just left in this grey area where you are not sure if she is going to become another Maria. Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil is missing the more hopeful ending of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue that I enjoyed so much.