The Bones Beneath my Skin ~ TJ KLUNE
Sit down- Grab a book.
Unscrolled Pages is our space to share books and stories that have impacted us, offering a glimpse into the ideas, emotions, and worlds that shape our perspectives. In a time where scrolling dominates how we consume information, we want to slow down, flip through pages, and invite you to join us in the timeless experience of reading—whether for escape, learning, or connection.
For my first review, I wanted to look at the book that I most recently finished- The Bones Beneath My Skin by TJ Klune.
TJ Klune is one of my favorite authors. He has written a number of incredible books (House in the Cerulean Sea, The Green Creek Series, and Under the Whispering Door to name a few)- some of which I am sure will come up in future posts, because they have been very impactful to me. Klune is a gay man, and many of his stories have gay characters, but their sexuality is not often the story- which is something I appreciate greatly in his writing. He typically writes from a third-person limited perspective, where you get great insight into one main character's thoughts and mainly engage with the other characters through how they are seen and perceived by that main character. He is a master of character building and is able to create characters with depth that you as the reader quickly attach to and fall in love with. There is an earnestness and honesty in his writing and characters that I find very refreshing and engaging.
My Summary
The Bones Beneath My Skin centers around a late-20s man named Nate Cartwright, who has experienced some major losses. The story begins with you discovering that both of his parents have died recently and left him a truck and their cabin by a lake in the Cascade Mountains of Washington (a common locale in Klune’s books). Nate has lost his job as a reporter- excuse me- journalist. He is deep in his feelings and heading to the cabin to lick his wounds and figure out where to go from here. When he arrives at what is supposed to be an empty cabin, he finds that it is decidedly not empty. A man named Alex Delgado and a seemingly 10-year-old girl named Artemis Darth Vader have taken up residence in his parent’s cabin. At first, he is basically a captive in what should be his own home, but something (maybe his journalistic intuition) is keeping him there and driving him to figure out who these squatters are and what or who they are running from. On his journey to get answers, Nate discovers that the girl is special- as is Alex, but in a different way. He finds himself having to make difficult choices, trust in himself and others again, and use his skills as a journalist to get to the bottom of the mystery of who Artemis really is and how to get her home.
This book was apparently originally written in 2017 with Klune’s publisher at the time returning the manuscript with the response “weird.” I would have to agree; The Bones Beneath My Skin is a weird book- but it is also beautiful. It is a hard book to categorize, which I think is what elicited that original response from the publisher. It has some slow-burn romance, but it's not a romance- and its definitely not smut. It features a child, but it isn’t a children’s book. There’s a lot of action and suspense and danger- but it's not really a thriller or an adventure book. This book deals with some very heavy topics- suicide, loss of parents (both emotionally from coming out and physically in death), loss of family, trust issues, power imbalances, grief, cynicism… but in true TJ Klune fashion, it handles them with grace and hope. So, I agree with the original publisher that its a bit weird in that respect, but I am so glad he persisted, self-published, and now re-released- because it is a beautiful story.
I personally connected to a number of things throughout the story. I identified with some of the losses that Nate experienced and some of the complicated feelings he was wrestling with surrounding family and where he fit in. I can’t go into too much detail because I don’t want to ruin the journey for any of you that may want to read it (or listen to it), but I also really enjoyed some of the explanations of what it means to be human. One of the things that I thought was beautiful was that though the story deals with a lot of loss and struggle, there is the acknowledgement that we as humans have it in us to pick each other up and push on. We each face our own battles and hardships, but through our connections to others we are able to carry each other and ourselves through those difficult times. All in all, this book is a beautiful story about what makes us human- a reminder that we are incredibly complex, but also wonderfully simple. Its easy to forget sometimes that we are all alike and connected, or that we are constantly surrounded by millions of other people who are all feeling and experiencing things just like us. We can easily lose sight of the fact that we are not alone and that everyone around us is just as real and as human as we are.
In the words of Artemis Darth Vader:
“It’s almost impossible to understand. None of us could get that. Not until they felt a heart beating in a chest like I have. Not until I felt the bones beneath my skin. We’re not alike. Not really. We’re separated by time and space. And yet, somehow, we’re all made of dust and stars. I think we’d forgotten that. And I don’t know if you ever knew that to begin with. How can you be alone when we’re all the same?”
If you are looking for a beautifully written story with simple- yet incredibly complex characters, a journey from grief to hope, and/or a reminder of some of the things that make being human a beautiful thing, then I would highly recommend this book. The Bones Beneath My Skin was captivating in every way- once I started it I couldn’t put it down. I spent the entirety of the train ride back from New York entirely engrossed. It's not a difficult read and even if sci-fi isn’t really your thing, it's very based in the real world- so though there are some sci-fi elements, it is still very real and truly moving.
