Reviewed by Saifunnissa Hassam for Readers' Favorite

Bart Carroll’s Bolted to the Bone is an exciting, gritty, and tightly interwoven tale of fantasy and science fiction. The story is set in the Emerald Remanant, a broken fragment of Earth, when Earth was fractured to its very core. Emerald is in orbit around Earth’s core and has a sky made of panels of glass held together by mechanical locks. Emerald is a land of saints, hierophants, and ollbeasts, reflecting ancient knights, Druids, and monsters from Earth’s myths and folklore. In a rare and cataclysmic event, a panel of the glass sky falls, splintering into countless tiny, sharp needles as it falls through the atmosphere and onto the town of Ros Cronan. All living and nonliving things are shredded by the glass rain. Saint Alexandra is assigned by the Church to investigate the catastrophe, to question the engineers and scientists involved in the installation and maintenance of the glass sky. Scrounger is a former saint who heads up the search-and-recovery crew at Ros Cronan. Scrounger faces the daunting challenge of finding three children missing from the site.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Bolted to the Bone, particularly for its complex characters. The immersive details of the backstories of Alexandra and Scrounger made this book a page turner. I was curious about the ever-deepening and multiplying mysteries in the tale. I liked the perilous and daunting challenges both characters face before and after the catastrophe. The story gained great depth from the inner transformative journeys that Alexandra and Scrounger go through, particularly as their investigations brought out their characters. The story and its many diverse and intriguing characters sprang to life through Bart Carroll's atmospheric descriptions of the Emerald world, great character illustrations, and the fascinating, brief notes of the Celtic-like past of Emerald at the start of each chapter. I loved the closing chapters, twisting and turning in unexpected ways. I loved the outstanding book cover of a saint with armor bolted to the bones. I highly recommend Bolted to the Bone to readers who enjoy complex, intertwined science fiction and fantasy stories, with great characters, and exciting reimagined Celtic and Arthurian myths and legends.