Okay full disclosure that this was my sixth straight horror/thriller read in a row this summer, and I might've just been hitting my upper limit of that kind of stuff when I read this one. Still, I think I wasn't quite prepared for how upsetting this YA book would be. That might sound kind of silly, given its focus on colonial history and an indentured girl struggling to deal with famine, but it somehow went straight over my head that this was set in The Starving Time despite that being mentioned in the blurb. When I was around fifty pages in or so and realized that, ohhh this was that ONE winter where everyone starved and when that one guy ate his wife, I probably should have set the book down again and, like, processed that a bit more. Instead, I read straight through to the end and was left feeling queasy and disturbed. This is a sign of effective writing, to be clear; Ellis' simple voice conveys both her uneducated status and her young age, and this childish tone made all of the horrible stuff happening twice as upsetting! It just also meant that I had a bad time reading this one. To be clear, I'm not usually bothered by horror and violence in general, or even

cannibalism and the protagonist literally dying at the end of the novel

but this just really got to me for some reason. It felt very dark for YA, and while usually that's my thing, I think I should've just... braced myself for the subject matter of this one more than I did.

I also think that, while the author is clearly trying to explore the wrongdoings of the European colonizers on indigenous land, I'm not sure she really succeeds. The main characters are largely white, and when indigenous characters do appear, it feels like they're most often mouthpieces to express the author's point rather than full-fledged characters, just by virtue of how little time we actually get to spend with them. The author's note makes it clear that this was the opposite of Bruzas' intentions, and I think she does a decent job of showing the unpreparedness, stupidity, and cruelty of the bulk of the Jamestown residents, but I just feel like the book didn't quite achieve the goals she describes in her author's note. 

Overall, To the Bone has some really effective writing (I am not easy to upset and this one absolutely managed to do that), and was an interesting exploration of this historical incident while being well-grounded in the time and actual historical evidence. I did enjoy Ellis as a character and was absolutely drawn into the atmosphere and descriptions of this one, I think I just ended up having a bad time. That might just be from reading too much horror consecutively, and I think queasy is actually the right feeling to be left with for the topics that this book is tackling, but I also don't especially feel like I learned anything that I didn't already know or had my views changed at all.