Haven Wardwell is supposed to be choosing between Elodie’s red dress and a glitter bodysuit when something hits the window. Then it hits again, harder. A crow is throwing itself at the glass of a third-floor dorm room, over and over, and Haven, who has spent a year learning to keep doors closed against things she cannot explain, finds her hand already on the latch. The bird comes in with one wing bent wrong, and she builds it a nest in a shoe box with newspaper and sunflower seeds. Hallowed Bones by Lucy Smoke is a book about a girl being asked to let things in, and the crow is its most honest picture of that request: it is wounded, demanding and very possibly sent by someone.
Five Voices, One Survivor
Haven arrives at Ipswich College a year after a fire killed both her parents, carrying a reputation for trouble that follows her from school to school. Lights die when she is upset. Her nightmares have teeth. The novel gives her most of its chapters, and it is a good voice to spend time with: prickly, self-mocking and quick. When a scarred young man discovers her hiding the crow and asks what it is, she tells him it is a baby pterodactyl. That sense of humour keeps the grief from turning into wallowing, and the grief is real. Her memory of the night of the fire has a hole in it, and the book circles that gap with patience. Long before any spell is cast, Hallowed Bones by Lucy Smoke has established that the person at its centre is a mourner first and a witch second, and the strongest chapters never lose sight of that order.
The other narrators are the four heirs of Salem’s old families, who turn out to be the last members of a coven that has not seen a female witch in three hundred years. Of the four, Lyall is the one the novel truly understands. He is the flirt, the one who shifts into a wolf, and also the boy whose childhood letters to the mother who left him come back unopened. Smoke places those letters at the head of his chapters and lets them do the work; the swagger reads differently once a reader knows what it is covering. Cameron, by contrast, is the most troubling. The bookish heir rereading The Picture of Dorian Gray for something he cannot find admits, in his own chapter, that he quietly pushed Haven toward their first kiss with magic. The novel registers his guilt and then moves on rather briskly.
The Names Are Not Invented
The coven’s families are the Wardwells, Goodes, Coreys, Bishops and Scotts. Each name echoes someone executed in 1692, and Haven’s own surname belongs to Samuel Wardwell, who confessed to witchcraft, recanted and was hanged that September. Smoke makes the borrowing count. The townspeople of present-day Salem still stare at the heirs in the general store, and one of the quietest, best scenes sends Lyall up the old hanging ground to find his coven leader sitting under a weeping willow, in a place where the ground itself seems to remember. The novel is clear-eyed about the town’s tourist trade in its own tragedy, and its witches distrust the living more than the dead.
The college is part of the same inheritance. Its administrators are a pair of pale, unsmiling twins who speak in unison, seem not to have aged in decades and refer to the students as souls. Haven’s roommate has dug up a local legend that the place began as an orphanage for children whose parents died in the trials, which sits neatly beside the official story of an anonymous benefactor. Hallowed Bones by Lucy Smoke never quite confirms either version, and the uncertainty suits a campus where the dust on the windowsills looks deliberate.
That history also gives Hallowed Bones by Lucy Smoke its curse. The coven believes its ancestors offended their gods, and that a priestess is the only cure.
What Hallowed Bones Asks of Its Heroine
Here the novel is less thoughtful than its setting. Haven is wanted, intensely and by all four men, partly for herself and partly because her body might restart a dying bloodline. One heir resists this, and his resistance is the book’s conscience, but the narrative mostly enjoys the attention it describes. Readers comfortable with possessive heroes will find the arrangement familiar from why-choose romance; others may notice how rarely anyone asks Haven what she wants until she is already in their house.
The romance is explicit, and the content runs to grief, ritual violence, childhood abuse and rough, consensual sex. One long scene near the end is entirely on the page. Elsewhere, desire is narrated so constantly that it starts to blur: almost every encounter in Hallowed Bones by Lucy Smoke registers in Haven’s body before anything is said.
The Horror Is the Best Thing in Hallowed Bones
Where Smoke is strongest is fear. In one sequence, Haven walks back from the dorm showers down a corridor where the lamps begin bursting one by one, and something crawls toward her on limbs too long for its body while speaking in her dead mother’s voice. The creature is pitiable as well as monstrous, and Haven’s pity is the mistake that hurts her. Later, a training session in the woods begins with flowers blooming in a ring around her bare feet and curdles into something far worse when the teacher beside her turns out not to be there at all. These scenes are patient, specific and genuinely unnerving, and they show a writer with a real gift for dread. Nothing else in Hallowed Bones by Lucy Smoke is written with quite the same control, and a reader finishing the book may wish its next instalment leaned harder into the dark.
The weaknesses are of a different kind:
- the murders of local townspeople, which open the plot, are investigated for a few chapters and then shelved;
- the witch lore tends to arrive in long explanatory conversations rather than through action;
- the crow, set up so carefully, is still a question at the end.
Hallowed Bones by Lucy Smoke opens the Sons of Salem series, and it ends on a cliffhanger rather than a resolution, so readers should expect to wait for most of the answers.
Readers who want more witchcraft with heat should try Night Witch by Jaymin Eve, which shares this book’s mix of dark academia and appetite. Arcana Academy by Elise Kova offers a more tightly plotted school of magic with a forbidden romance at its centre. And anyone whose interest is caught by the real names should go to Stacy Schiff’s The Witches: Salem, 1692, which makes the history stranger than any coven.
After the Last Page
The book Smoke has written is two novels sharing a cover: a lush, why-choose romance, and a horror story about grief that keeps knocking on the glass. The romance will sell it. The horror is what makes it worth reading, along with a heroine who can still be funny while the lights go out around her. Hallowed Bones by Lucy Smoke has not yet decided whether Haven is a salvation or a sentence, and neither has she.
In the end the crow is the right emblem. Something wounded asked to come inside, and she opened the window. The rest of the series will have to say what flew in.