The ghosts of unwanted emotions grow into new people in The Bone Orchard, an arresting, complex and moving fantasy-mystery by debut novelist Sara A. Mueller.
When the wind blows through the trees of Mistress Charm's orchard, "the solid ones clatter while the long bones chimed and fluted." Charm uses the harvest to maintain her boneghosts, aspects of herself she has psychically split and placed in artificially grown bodies: Pain, Pride, Shame, Justice and Desire. At Orchard House, Charm's brothel, the boneghosts serve a clientele that includes the most well-to-do members of the Boren Empire as well as the capital city's mind-melded psychic guards. Charm is mistress to both the Emperor and his captive, former nobility from a conquered country of necromancers. When someone poisons the Emperor, he gives Charm her final orders: find out which of his four mad, treacherous sons murdered him, kill the guilty man and any conspirators and choose a worthy heir. If she does, she wins her freedom. Scheming nobles, deadly princes and political intrigue haunt her every move, but Charm must face her own splintered self to succeed.
Mueller's world of psychics and necromancers is as delicate and intricate as the skeletal system. At its heart, Charm and her ghosts alternately clash with and support each other as they process their shared past and their separation. This luminous metaphor for depersonalization following a traumatic event lends a solid emotional core to Mueller's captivating premise in this challenging, cathartic tale of redemption. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads