Through reading (and loving) The Silence of Bones I’ve realized something about myself as a reader: I can tolerate a lot of dark, violent content in a book if the prose is pretty enough. And while the poetic prose is a definite selling point, the fact that The Silence of Bones is also an impeccably crafted mystery with amazing character work and an arc of profound hopefulness cemented its place in my heart as the best book I’ve read all year.

This book follows Seol, a 16-year old living in the capital of Joseon (Korea) who works as an indentured servant to the police department in the year 1800. This means she completes household tasks and errands for the department but also assists in investigations that involve female victims, as Confucian law dictates that men should not touch women to whom they are unrelated. She comes from a family that was once noble but was exiled for treason when she was very young, which is how she has become a member of the servant class. All that remains of her family is her sister, who lives in the countryside, and her brother, who she believes is likely dead as she has not heard from him in many years. The main plot follows Seol’s involvement in investigating the murder of a young noblewoman, but there are also subplots about Seol searching for her brother and the political situation in Joseon.

While this book is marketed as YA, I think that has more to do with the age of the heroine (Seol is 16) than with the content or the writing style, which I found similar to many of the adult-oriented historical mysteries I have read.

Seol is a wonderful heroine. She is quick-witted, curious (even nosy!), resourceful, and has a sense of her own innate worth in a world that devalues her completely as a woman and a servant. I pretty much fell in love with her as a heroine when I read this early paragraph:

Older Sister always scolded me for having the airs of a Chinese empress. Growing up, I would always clamor after attention, convinced that I deserved much more–more love, more appreciation, more kindness. How could a servant have had such thoughts?

You do deserve more, Seol!

Through the course of the book, she moves from extremely binary thinking about the world (good/evil, loyal/disloyal, family/not family, servant/nobility) to a much more nuanced, mature stance. It was truly a joy to watch her come through scrape after scrape via a combination of cunning, determination, and generosity from others.

In addition to a loveable young heroine-slash-investigator, this book is jam-packed with a memorable cast. Even characters who only appear in a few scenes feel complicated and real, and Seol’s relationships with other characters are layered with nuance. The relationship centerpiece in this book is her complicated ally/adversary dynamic with Inspector Han, the exacting police inspector she assists in the murder case. But other particular highlights include her rivalry with an egotistical, blustering young police officer; her friendship with the members of a noble Catholic household; and her inscrutable interactions with a pithy, supercilious nobleman implicated in the investigation.

At one point, she asks this nobleman:

‘Why have you confided in one such as I?’

‘Why, don’t you know?’ He looked at me and arched a single brow. ‘Everyone here in the bureau is too quick to judge, and it will end in the death of someone innocent. But you, you are an eavesdropper. The only person in this bureau who truly listens.’

Even small interactions like the one above feel like they are crammed with gold nuggets of dialogue and characterization.

This is very much a character-driven mystery, where understanding what different characters want and why they want it is key to solving the case. The mystery aspect of this book felt like an intricate puzzle box. Information is spooled out to Seol (and the reader) at the perfect rate. It seems as though each detail answers one question and raises five more. I won’t go too much into detail here as I think this is the kind of book where the reader genuinely benefits from not knowing much going in. With that said, even though I caught on to a couple of the major reveals early on, I was still not 100% confident in who the murderer was until it was revealed. It is always nice to read a mystery that is decidedly not obvious.

In addition to awesome characters and a phenomenally-constructed mystery, the detailed historical world felt fully realized. This enabled the book to explore a number of themes without feeling bloated. While the main focus of The Silence of Bones is on Seol’s relationships and how those are wrapped up in the mystery, this book also touches on a number of issues like social stratification and hierarchy, literacy, censorship, globalism, and religious persecution. As Seol thinks early on in the book about servants learning to read,

What better way to defy the role of servants than to teach them to read and write? To equip them with the same knowledge and power as their own masters and mistresses?

(YES, WORKERS, RISE UP!) Because the world feels real, and issues like these (class stratification, literacy) are endemic to the historical world, their inclusion adds even more depth and heft to the story.

A melancholy, haunting tone pervades The Silence of Bones. Much of the beautiful prose is suffused with profound sadness and loss, as in the following excerpt:

I fell quiet. The sketch of my brother always opened me up to a world filled with echoes, like a faraway stranger calling to me from a mountaintop. I missed his stories about home, a home I had been too young to remember, a home filled with the intensity of affectionate words and the texture of comforting arms around me. Those tales had vanished and had left me feeling hollow, as though I were a wandering spirit.

BRB, I have to go dry my tears with an embroidered handkerchief and find a natural vista to gaze at sadly while I think about the ghosts of the past.

I found myself having competing urges to charge through the book because I was compelled by the mystery, and wanting to consume it in short sips to absorb the prose (and to not be overwhelmed by the haunting tone and heavy content).

As I have already alluded to, this book does not shy away from depicting dark themes. My experience as a reader was that these themes were handled with care but it is still a lot to digest. One of the major plot threads concerns the impact of intergenerational trauma, which does not involve graphic depictions of violence but is incredibly sad. The murder investigation piece does involve violence, some of it fairly graphic (e.g. some gnarly corpse mutilation and the torture of a suspect). This is a harsh world to be in; as Inspector Han says:

There are only two types of people: those you protect and those you crush so that they can never rise up again.

Yes, this is definitely the chill and supportive attitude I want in my boss as I try to solve a murder case.

Slightly leavening the heaviness is a somewhat dry humor that crops up throughout the book. For example:

‘Do you wish for our kingdom to be invaded by foreigners from the West?’

I did not know much about the West; all I knew was that I disliked change. ‘Absolutely not, sir.’

This is such Teen Person Logic that I couldn’t help but laugh.

Without spoiling anything, the book ends on a hopeful note. I had a sense after closing the book that Seol had experienced a lot of growth and was headed on her way to a personally fulfilling life without the ghosts of the past dragging her down. So even though this book has hefty subject matter I did feel satisfyingly uplifted on her behalf in the end.

Clearly, I thought this book was amazing. I loved the prose, the characters, the mystery, and the setting. From a craft perspective I found this book masterful, and it took me on an intense emotional journey. I think this is a literal must-read for historical mystery fans provided they do not mind some violence. However, anyone who is not feeling up to a book with a lot of sad and difficult content should probably skip The Silence of Bones, at least for now.