I was about five pages into Game of Bones when I started doing the slow-blink “what the heck am I reading”.
We meet the heroine, Sarah Booth Delaney, when she’s riding her horse around her family’s ancestral Southern plantation estate and mourning the fact that she’s had to lease most of its ‘vast acres’ to a local farmer. So when she’s having vague money worries later on in the book, it really doesn’t ring true; what about the lease income from those ‘vast acres’?. And yes, if I was descended from slave-owners, I might wish I wasn’t too - but I wouldn’t be hoping to find ‘exotic g’psy’ in my DNA test.
Honestly, that’s two racial slurs slapped together in the same thought, but what else can you expect from an author who has a former slave haunting and helping the descendant of her owners? Not only that, but pressing her to have children so the line can continue, and manifesting as a series of prominent First Nation women from history who all, inexplicably, want to help and protect Sarah Booth.
There’s so much hot racist mess in this book I can’t begin to express my disgust with it, but my greatest rage is reserved for the Nice White Ladies who have made this series so popular the author has written 20 of them, and are all over the reviews praising the author for teaching them about Native American culture. I mean, personally I’d go and read something by an actual Native author, but maybe that’s a bit too far out of their comfort zone.
One star for a privileged, racist mess which can’t even keep its own story continuity straight.
Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.