The Bones Beneath My Skin

I liked being the weird girl. Picture me in England in 1995. I have a Tardis embroidered on my shoulder bag, wear off brand platform shoes, and carry a picture of Riker around in my wallet. I write poems when I should probably be playing Netball, and I made one of my best friends by singing along to the Red Dwarf theme music after gym class.

I liked being the weird girl. But not everyone’s experience of the word weird is positive. So it is with TJ Klune, who explains in the notes to The Bones Beneath My Skin that hearing an off hand comment from his publisher describing this book as “ weird even for him” was jarring, and had him running right back to his teenage self.

So I say this with all the positivity I myself associate with the word weird, with the love I have for the descriptor, The Bones Beneath My Skin is a weird book.

Weird is in fact the first thing I thought when I finished the book. It is also a book that I read straight through in less than 24 hours over a snow storm that found me trapped with my kids, husband, and inlaws in a cabin in the woods. Well my in-laws’ house in Northern Maine, but a cabin in the woods is what it felt like when reading this book. This is not my usual area of fiction, it’s an unusual choice for me, but it is also a book that I could not stop turning the pages of, and kind of want to read what happens next.

The story is set in 1995, which is considered by my peers and I to be one of the perfect years. This was the year of the original Toy Story, Apollo 13, and Goldeneye. TLC’s “Waterfalls” won the MTV Video Music Award for Video of the Year, and has been stuck on loop in all of our minds ever since. In the 1995 of The Bones Beneath My Skin we join journalist Nate Cartwright at a pivotal moment in his life. He has lost his job, his family and his sense of direction, all of which lead him to his family’s remote cabin in Oregon. This is where stranger things start to happen. The cabin is not as empty as he expected, and he stumbles on an ex-Marine, a 10 year old girl, and a whole lot of trouble. On the run from a secret government organization the three are quickly running together across the country.

I have been wanting to read TJ Klune for a while, but this is the first one I picked up. From what I now know, I think his other books are more in my wheelhouse, but it is not an exaggeration to say, this guy can write. From descriptions of Artemis exploring the world, to Artemis destroying the world, to Artemis discovering a gas station, he has a way with story telling that tingles every facet of all the senses. He creates complex characters of few words that pull you along into their stories and their rhythms. He makes you think, and then re-think, and then think again about things you already know, fictional and in the real world.

The biggest non-spoiler theme of The Bones Beneath My Skin is humanity. What is humanity? Where do we get our humanity? What drives our humanity?. Just this week I ended up in a conversation with three grocery store workers as they were checking out me and my stash of fun size Twix bars. Two teenagers were saying that only bad people do bad things, and the third teenager was saying that good people do bad things. This kind of conversation is my jam, so I piped up with my personal belief that people do all kinds of things, good or bad, because people are people. Humanity is self destructive and this book takes a birds eye view of what makes us destructive but also what makes us beautiful.

So yeah, it’s weird, but I’m weird. I’m still not sure this book was entirely my cup of tea, but it was definitely riveting, it was definitely thought provoking. I have already recommended it to several people, and willfully not recommended it to several others. For me it was weird in all the good ways, and in all the weird ways.