Outside the Bones

by Lyn Di Iorio

Fina is a big girl with a big mouth. She's the neighborhood "spirit worker," casting spells for her neighbors in Manhattan's Upper West Side. She can't believe it, though, when she puts an accidental fuf or spell on Chico, the irresistible trumpet player who lives upstairs. Chico recovers just as two women from his past turn his former beauty-queen lover and an attractive young woman claiming to be his long-dead daughter. Fina is not pleased. So she visits her mentor, Tata Victor Tumba Fuego, Master of Fire. He specializes in Palo Monte, the Afro-Caribbean magical art of controlling and manipulating spirits housed in cauldrons. All too soon she finds herself involved with a spirit whose quest for revenge can't be stopped. Weaving Afro-Caribbean witchcraft rituals with the sixteen-year-old mystery of a woman's disappearance, Outside the Bones is an erotically charged ghost story set in both present-day New York and Puerto Rico.

Genres: Fiction, Witches, Fantasy

199 pages, Paperback

First published September 30, 2011

Reviews

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Egads! or, I dunno, Gadzooks! That was something!

OK, books come to us in many ways, from wildly different directions, and this one is no exception other than that it's very much not something I would have found in my favorite indie bookstore or at my splendid public library or ... well ... that's the whole point. But life is long and full of connections and webs, and ... this, this book. But, ultimately, I'm glad I ended up buying and reading it.

I really had no idea what to expect, but what first resonated with me was the narrator's voice! Loud, and brash, and ... brassy ... and profane ... and unfiltered, and often, frankly, hysterically funny, but, very much compelling.

Bizarre as every aspect of the wildly spinning carousel of characters and geographically and temporally disorienting storyline may have been, I was intrigued ... nah, all in ... by the end of the first chapter - no, who am I fooling? - by the second page, even if I didn't have a clue where it was all going.

Reviewer's nit: There's a brief (and helpful) explanatory/conceptual GLOSSARY of (mostly) words and (a very small number of) phrases in the back, but this reader would have preferred if it were more inclusive. Sure, Google Translate could handle the infrequent non-English incantations, rants, riffs, and exhortations, but - and, again, this is just me - it wasn't clear to me why some were included in the glossary and some weren't, and it would have saved me a fair amount of time if the glossary just included all of them ... or ... if the narrator defined them as they arose, as she often did.

Forewarned is forearmed: This is not Austen-style gentile parlor banter and chaste courting ritual drama/farce. Gothic? Horror? ... Sure. The cover of the version I read tossed out apt phrases ranging from magical urbanism and sassy supernatural to Afro-Caribbean witchcraft rituals and erotically charged ghost story, and those all work for me. Sure, I've shelved it as sci-fi and fantasy, because that's my catch-all, but this is decidedly unfiltered, graphic, brutal, ... visceral, in-your-face kind of stuff, respecting no niceties with regard to violence, sex, or the vocabulary, nomenclature, or semantic choices available with regard to both. I guess my primary point here is: think twice about where you leave this lying around or before you recommend (or hand) this to ... whomever.

[Princess Night · Rating 1 out of 5]

I am only reading these Caribbean books for an English college class. None of these plots are interesting or make sense 😭

[Neena · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enchanting and entertaining - a wonderful read, full of fun and magic.

[Luis Castillo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lyn Di Iorio’s debut novel, Outside the Bones, is a brilliant literary achievement that places her in an elite group of Latino writers who posses a distinctive voice bursting with verve, humor, lyricism and originality. Fina, the narrator-protagonist of Outside the Bones, is a feisty East Harlem Latina willing to do anything to capture the heart of Chico, a Puerto Rican mujeriego trumpet player with a dark past. Known as the neighborhood bruja for working little trabajitos and fufús, Fina delves even deeper into the world of the supernatural when she seeks the help of Tata Victor, a palero who specializes in Palo Monte, to assist her in her plan to seduce Chico. But unfortunately, Fina’s plan of seduction takes an unexpected turn when she is possessed by a spirit who is out for blood. Taking us from New York to the island of Puerto Rico and back again, Outside the Bones, takes us on a magical journey from which we emerge, as if from a spell cast by Di Iorio and her storytelling prowess, fully convinced of the power of the novel.

[pickfordm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lyn Di Iorio's "Outside the Bones" is an intelligent read, fast-paced and packed with adventure. The narrator, Fina, is a bruja, a self described "spirit worker," who after the breakup of her marriage begins to take her gifts more seriously. When she casts a few spells in an attempt to win the heart of Chico,the sexy trumpet player who lives in her apartment building, and to get rid of her competition, she becomes enmeshed in an intricate web of intrigue and murder. As Fina gets to the core of the mystery, she also learns the secrets of her own long-buried past. Di Iorio also provides vivid descriptions of the rituals of Palo, an Afro-Caribbean religio-magical tradition, as Fina learns to cast spells and fly with the nfuiris, or spirits, which fill her world. Altogether, this is an accessible and entertaining novel, and an impressive literary debut.

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm so happy this book exists. More of this please! Great read and so refreshing to have a paranormal theme I could actually relate to.

[Noah P. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty good book; very interesting; could have been 200 pages longer.

[Melanie Page · Rating 2 out of 5]

Content Warnings: vivid sexual language, murder, violence, and some descriptions of blood.

Outside the Bones is narrated by Fina, a Latina in New York City who is originally from Puerto Rico. She provides details about herself early on, describing why she had married her ex-husband: “his being white and even-tempered seemed to guarantee that he would always be nice.”

But Fina’s husband cheated on her with a thin woman. In that moment, Fina remembers, her husband “glanced at the tattooed lovebirds spilling out of [her] stretchy low-cut top, and finally stopped at the jelly belly that didn’t like to stay under nothing.” I’m assuming the negative diction — “jelly belly” — is not meant to be cute. Furthermore, Fina notes, “I may be a big girl, but I have a refined soul.” She implies it can’t be both: a big girl AND a refined soul, thus the reader stumbles into fat shaming. Fina even tries to escape her body when she dances. She gets out of her “fat girl avatar,” as if her body is not really her own, and allows herself to be a “sweaty J. Lo,” a celebrity worshiped for (mainly) a larger rear end but an acceptably small body in general.

Finally, she just labels herself: “a 200-pound ghetto bitch queen.” 200 pounds is in the range of “acceptably fat,” the kind of fat person we see in publications that try to show fat people really are “cute,” but only use models who are not much bigger than the average woman. I noted that Lyn Di Iorio is not a fat woman, but she did grow up in Puerto Rico, making this an #ownvoices book in some ways.

The novel is more so about a form of witchcraft called Palo, which traveled from Puerto Rico to New York City. It takes most of the book to gather all the necessary information to understand the practice. Fina explains that she “pretended to be a witch,” not giving me much confidence in her at first. She’s Victor Tata’s student, and he is “master of ngangas” (I’m assuming that means spirits).

Later, she tells a co-worker that the spells she casts are “unpredictable” because “they weren’t really made for white people, or non-Latinos.” It doesn’t feel like Fina knows much about anything. Information about Palo comes out in ways that isn’t explained:

Trouble was there was no coming back from the cutting. To be cut in Palo meant that you might see all the nfuiris, all the spirits of the dead and all the nkisis, and the gods of the woods and wind and even the few born lately into the street.

I don’t know what it means to be cut or what nfuiris and nkisis are. I found at the end a glossary for such terms, but with an e-book, you don’t see that sort of thing until it’s too late. Eventually, Fina stumbles into some bones that claim her, and readers learn Fina is capable of witchcraft.

Halfway through the book I learned that these nfuiris and nkisis are spirits of people who died violently. The spirits find themselves “outside the bones.” They can live in other creatures if they want, like a rat, to move around more, but ultimately the spirits are tied to their own bones. Thus, people who practice Palo can gather up those bones, keep them in a cauldron, and command the spirits to do good or evil. They keeper of bones feeds the spirit blood (is that the cutting part?), typically the keeper’s own.

Outside the Bones has a confusing plot. Fina is in love with her neighbor, Chico, who lives in the same apartment building. He was married in Puerto Rico, but his wife and baby died from an illness. A strange sexy teenager shows up one day claiming to be the dead daughter. Then another woman, a former pageant winner from Puerto Rice with whom Chico had an affair in the past, also shows up. Trying to figure out who these women really are and what they mean to Chico is challenging — and I didn’t find the challenge worth it. It’s not until the end of the novel that we learn more about Chico’s dead wife, daughter, who this teenager is, and why the beauty queen is there. Mixed in is two pretty gruesome murders and another murder that seemed pointless (to the plot). Why didn’t Lyn Di Iorio give more clues about the past throughout the novel instead of dumping them all at the end? There is also information about Fina’s dad in the form of flashbacks, but his significance to the story is unclear.

Mostly, though, you’ll notice the sexual language and likely be repelled. All the scenes included are descriptions of female anatomy that struck me as pornographic and unnecessary — and none of them were about Fina. What was the point of letting a fat witch tell the story if it pretty much isn’t about her? Then, in one situation Fina makes a comment that could be interpreted as homophobic because she can’t stop staring at another woman’s naked body, but wants to clarify that she isn’t a lesbian. Clarify to who — the reader?

Overall, I felt like Di Iorio held back too much information for too long and chose the wrong person to narrate the story. I didn’t care what happened next because there wasn’t a clear plot thread to follow, and if there is no motivation for the characters, their stories seem random. As a result, it took me 16 days to finish this 208-page novel.

I do love the cover, though!

This review was originally published at Grab the Lapels.

[Krystal · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a great book! It took forever to read but I did it and I'm glad I did ✌🏽.

Some parts sucked me in and I binge read as much as time allowed. other parts took me actual years to get through. 'Outside the Bones' is intriguing, thoughtful and the cadence is poetic. I recommend it! But be patient with it. It took me 4 years 😂

[Banbury · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book should have been better with elements of witchcraft, crushes, infidelity, and Puerto Rican culture transferred to New York City. Unfortunately, it was a tale poorly told with characters acting in ways that seem inconsistent with how they have been portrayed, and plot twists that just seem random. The sex scenes were dull and seem an excuse to throw in a bit of pornography.

[Nick Holmberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was disorienting, like much magic realism. But the characters and setting are so well-evoked that it will be worth re-reading.

[Monica · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5