A journalist picking up the wreckage of his life blunders into the adventure--and love--of a lifetime in The Bones Beneath My Skin, a witty, swoony soft sci-fi thriller by TJ Klune (In the Lives of Puppets).
The year is 1995, and Nate Cartwright has lost his job at a major Washington, D.C., newspaper and returned to his family's cabin in remote Herschel Lake, Ore., to evaluate his options. He does not expect to find squatters at the cabin: a huge Marine named Alex, who puts a gun to Nate's head, and a little girl named Artemis Darth Vader. Nate has no idea what to make of the taciturn, overprotective man and his tiny ward, who has never eaten bacon, makes pronouncements such as, "I like money. It smells weird," and overindulges in Louis L'Amour novels. But when powerful forces come for Art, who is revealed to be far more than an ordinary child, Nate's concern for her and his growing connection with Alex drive him to risks beyond measure and a love greater than anything he could have ever imagined.
This independent-minded novel reads like an action-adventure, romance, and road-trip narrative combined. Originally self-published in 2018, the novel's absurd humor, clever banter, and opposites paired as love interests foreshadow elements of Klune's breakout hit, The House in the Cerulean Sea. This delightfully different story of danger, loneliness, and making "a home out of a place where one should not exist" combines the cozy and the perilous into something a little bit like magic. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads