What do you think?
Bone Horn
Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas are the most famous married couple of Modernism, icons of literary lesbian history. But what if Alice had a secret? What if, underneath her thickly cultivated fringe and low brimmed hats, there was something sinister growing? What if, as Picasso claimed, Alice B. Toklas really did have a horn?
This is what the mysterious voice on the phone is asking of her. And she’s in no position to hang up; a newly registered Private Investigator, she recently walked away from an exploitative job in academia, is bereaved following the sudden death of her partner, and has a kid to support. The case sounds ridiculous, but she needs the money. Okay, she tells the voice. I’ll find the horn. The job takes her from London to Paris to San Francisco, from a Hemingway’s kitchen table to a Beat-inspired hotel run by an investment bank. Just when she thinks the case is dead, that no horn exists, she finds herself knee-deep in trouble with someone hot on her heels…
At once a reimagining of the lone wolf detective and a hilarious take down of self-important scholarship, Bone Horn is a smart, hilarious, sexy, and poignant mystery novel about queerness, unbearable grief, and the question of stories, and which are ours to tell.
This is what the mysterious voice on the phone is asking of her. And she’s in no position to hang up; a newly registered Private Investigator, she recently walked away from an exploitative job in academia, is bereaved following the sudden death of her partner, and has a kid to support. The case sounds ridiculous, but she needs the money. Okay, she tells the voice. I’ll find the horn. The job takes her from London to Paris to San Francisco, from a Hemingway’s kitchen table to a Beat-inspired hotel run by an investment bank. Just when she thinks the case is dead, that no horn exists, she finds herself knee-deep in trouble with someone hot on her heels…
At once a reimagining of the lone wolf detective and a hilarious take down of self-important scholarship, Bone Horn is a smart, hilarious, sexy, and poignant mystery novel about queerness, unbearable grief, and the question of stories, and which are ours to tell.
240 pages, Paperback
Published June 19, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 48 reviews
July 14, 2025
I don't usually write scathing reviews. I give my 1/2 stars and move on. But this book needs a special mention.
For a book about 300 pages, there are lots of parts where nothing really happens to move the plot. All of the events seem very forced and incredibly contrived. There is tension in the book, but only tension about who's the next woman who's going to fuck the main character. This is one of those erotica books that you find with a shirtless man on the cover and a woman looking slavishly, but hiding underneath a weak detective story with a lesbian main character. Every single woman she meets wants to fuck her in their first meeting, and not just fuck her, but dominate her. Our MC is ever willing to 'fill all the holes in her life'. Speaking of that, I have to mention some of the choice quotes, which I don't believe should belong in a serious book. Incredibly cheesy sentences that might fit better in an erotica or a porno than an actual novel. It feels written by a straight man imagining how lesbians might have sex.
"Let's go upstairs, I like to fuck people in the light.", said by a woman to MC she met 30 minutes ago.
"I know how glasses can smash if they're dropped at the wrong angle." MC makes a profound observation right before she's fucked by a character who's washing her glass coffee maker.
"I had been sleeping with a lot of people recently. It wasn't making me feel better. I was filling all the wrong holes in my life." MC to herself because why not.
"I have a PhD." MC to the person she's just met, to show that she's not completely dumb.
"No, they mostly want it in the EE Cummings section." Woman to MC (whom she's just met) while she's fucking the MC in a bookshop. (I imagine the author felt rather clever in coming up with this on their own, so much so that they use it multiple times in the book.)
"What makes you wet?" Right as MC is about to be a latex-glove-adorned finger-fucked, by a person they'd met once, of course.
Not to mention the lesbian cop who is into bondage and wants to handcuff the MC with handcuffs (THAT ARE NOT USED FOR HER JOB, as she explains) that she casually happens to have on her.
Then there's a plot itself, which is meandering, with unnecessary threads which lead to nowhere, except placeholders so that the author can write about yet another person fucking the MC, the MC finding people too easily who are very willing to talk to her unprompted and give her clues to solving the mystery without much prodding. And then there's the way the mystery is solved. What an anti-climactic letdown, what a travesty. But I should have guessed that it was going to be a letdown, seeing how the book was meandering so much.
The author also has this weird fixation with describing voices with everything other than how you describe a voice. A voice is described once as oily, not fresh in the pan, but laying on top of yesterday's dishwater (someone please explain how they arrived at this). It is also described as a static yolk of a thing, the words like a soft bursting across the white light of the room. It is also described as slick again, uncooked around the edges, feeling tacky between the MC's fingers. And another instance where it is whipped into a lukewarm frenzy, part mayonnaise comfort and part undeniable excitement.
As I finished (struggling to read) the book, I asked myself whether someone was playing a prank on me by making me read this book with its terrible writing. The author is an associate lecturer in creative writing; I feel sad for her students. I cannot believe someone with an English PhD can write such drivel (nothing to do with the plot, everything to do with the writing itself). I have read fan fiction with better language. Sometimes people need to be told no.
I'm glad we've at least reached a point in society where we can have bad queer books with terrible queer characters written by queer people, rather than written by straight men.
For a book about 300 pages, there are lots of parts where nothing really happens to move the plot. All of the events seem very forced and incredibly contrived. There is tension in the book, but only tension about who's the next woman who's going to fuck the main character. This is one of those erotica books that you find with a shirtless man on the cover and a woman looking slavishly, but hiding underneath a weak detective story with a lesbian main character. Every single woman she meets wants to fuck her in their first meeting, and not just fuck her, but dominate her. Our MC is ever willing to 'fill all the holes in her life'. Speaking of that, I have to mention some of the choice quotes, which I don't believe should belong in a serious book. Incredibly cheesy sentences that might fit better in an erotica or a porno than an actual novel. It feels written by a straight man imagining how lesbians might have sex.
"Let's go upstairs, I like to fuck people in the light.", said by a woman to MC she met 30 minutes ago.
"I know how glasses can smash if they're dropped at the wrong angle." MC makes a profound observation right before she's fucked by a character who's washing her glass coffee maker.
"I had been sleeping with a lot of people recently. It wasn't making me feel better. I was filling all the wrong holes in my life." MC to herself because why not.
"I have a PhD." MC to the person she's just met, to show that she's not completely dumb.
"No, they mostly want it in the EE Cummings section." Woman to MC (whom she's just met) while she's fucking the MC in a bookshop. (I imagine the author felt rather clever in coming up with this on their own, so much so that they use it multiple times in the book.)
"What makes you wet?" Right as MC is about to be a latex-glove-adorned finger-fucked, by a person they'd met once, of course.
Not to mention the lesbian cop who is into bondage and wants to handcuff the MC with handcuffs (THAT ARE NOT USED FOR HER JOB, as she explains) that she casually happens to have on her.
Then there's a plot itself, which is meandering, with unnecessary threads which lead to nowhere, except placeholders so that the author can write about yet another person fucking the MC, the MC finding people too easily who are very willing to talk to her unprompted and give her clues to solving the mystery without much prodding. And then there's the way the mystery is solved. What an anti-climactic letdown, what a travesty. But I should have guessed that it was going to be a letdown, seeing how the book was meandering so much.
The author also has this weird fixation with describing voices with everything other than how you describe a voice. A voice is described once as oily, not fresh in the pan, but laying on top of yesterday's dishwater (someone please explain how they arrived at this). It is also described as a static yolk of a thing, the words like a soft bursting across the white light of the room. It is also described as slick again, uncooked around the edges, feeling tacky between the MC's fingers. And another instance where it is whipped into a lukewarm frenzy, part mayonnaise comfort and part undeniable excitement.
As I finished (struggling to read) the book, I asked myself whether someone was playing a prank on me by making me read this book with its terrible writing. The author is an associate lecturer in creative writing; I feel sad for her students. I cannot believe someone with an English PhD can write such drivel (nothing to do with the plot, everything to do with the writing itself). I have read fan fiction with better language. Sometimes people need to be told no.
I'm glad we've at least reached a point in society where we can have bad queer books with terrible queer characters written by queer people, rather than written by straight men.
August 13, 2026
I got the audiobook to review.
Enjoyed the narration of the audiobook, the voice fit well with the book. Its a mystery very slowly being researched. Sexual encounters and the main characters inner dialogue. While it didn't feel a lot happened plot wise I enjoyed the story weather or not the horn existed.
Enjoyed the narration of the audiobook, the voice fit well with the book. Its a mystery very slowly being researched. Sexual encounters and the main characters inner dialogue. While it didn't feel a lot happened plot wise I enjoyed the story weather or not the horn existed.
July 18, 2026
About a week before I opened up my copy of Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain’s Bone Horn, I spent an evening watching last year’s documentary film about comedian Marc Maron entitled Are We Good? In the year before it was filmed, Marc’s partner of several years, the insanely brilliant director Lynn Shelton, passed away after an alarmingly short battle with undiagnosed leukemia. The bulk of the film centers around Marc’s attempts to traverse through his immense wealth of grief by working things out very publicly on various live comedy stages around the world via his own tried and true brand of ultra confessional and conversational comedy.
It’s a difficult watch witnessing someone actually do the steps required to move forward in a healthy way only to have the slightest thing absolutely shatter their heart into pieces all over again for what must feel like the millionth time. At one point in the film, Marc shows the director a handful of items that belonged to his partner that he had kept and accidentally uncovers a stash of several of his partner’s notebooks that he had been unaware existed before that moment. You can pinpoint the exact frame and expression that clouds his face with the realization of how horrible he feels for stumbling across his partner’s keepsakes, doubled by the fact that he discovered them while being filmed. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter that the love of his life isn’t around to hide them anymore, those pages in which she scrawled down her thoughts, her notes for a project or just doodled in the margins still belong solely to her and should always belong only to her.
Bone Horn presents itself as a modern day take on that timeless classic - the pulp detective novel. At it’s beginning, the unnamed narrator, fresh off a career rebranding from the academic world to that of becoming a private investigator for hire, receives an phone call from a voice that will not identify themselves. The anonymous voice convinces the narrator to take on a case in which she must provide definitive proof that Alice B. Toklas, the long deceased partner of renowned Modernist writer/poet/socialite Gertrude Stein, had spent her entire life hiding the fact that she had a horn growing from her head.
I know that you’re already thinking that it’s a bizarre impetus to find yourself handed within the first few pages of a brand new book because I felt the exact same way when I first cracked my copy open. But I was also intrigued at where this entire line of thought that our author had presented us with was travelling and wanted to know why it was headed that direction. Thankfully, the story that follows after that fateful phone call isn’t just intriguing, insightful and incredibly heartfelt, it’s also deeply informative in it’s unabashed love and respect for not just the Modernism movement of the early 20th century, but also for the two women at the heart of the mystery, Gertrude and Alice.
Bone Horn may brand itself as and appear at first glance to be an updated take on the deliciously salacious detective novels of old, but in truth, it ends up being a triple threat of sorts. It is at once a frolic through the world of mystery, a crushing meditation on grief and also an examination on the power of gossip, rumour and intrigue and it’s ability to alter the strands of history. As you learn more about the life of Alice B. Toklas in the aftermath of Gertrude Stein’s passing in 1946, you are also made aware of the narrator having also recently lost her own partner, May, very suddenly. Alice’s response to the death of her one true love was to isolate herself from almost everyone while burying herself in the study of Gertrude’s unreleased work as she sold of pieces of their shared existence to keep herself afloat financially. Our narrator’s response is to abandon her career, have a child, train to become a private investigator and dip her toe in the world of emotionless one-night stands with various women.
As the story moves on and the mystery of Alice’s rumoured skull horn deepens with the narrator finding herself in various locales such as London, Paris and San Francisco, the parallels between her grief and the anguish that Alice experienced become much more clear. In searching for some record of Alice’s physical appearance that would confirm her anonymous donor’s request, she wades through decades of notes, photographs, essays, interviews, etc. that plumb the depths of Alice’s life with Gertrude and maybe more importantly, her life after Gertrude. Ultimately, grief becomes the defining character of this story in all of it’s forms as it washes over all of the characters that make up Bone Horn, touching each moment and colouring each decision made. In that same way that it was powerful yet awkward to watch as Marc Maron pushed through his pain to continue his craft and evolve as an artist and as a human, it’s a difficult and yet enlightening experience to walk alongside the narrator as she attempts to move forward with her life, both personally and professionally, in the only ways that she knows how.
Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain has crafted a story that is rich with historical touchstones that had me revisiting my well-worn copy of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons in tandem with my reading of Bone Horn. She not only manages to carry us on an intriguing adventure, but through the narrator espousing details about the lives of Gertrude and Alice and the wealth of assorted well-known individuals that passed through their universe, we are given a glimpse into two women at the forefront of first-wave feminism that serves to parallel aspects of the narrator’s own difficult journey while also providing stepping stones for readers to look outside of Bone Horn for a deeper understanding of these two remarkable icons.
It’s a difficult watch witnessing someone actually do the steps required to move forward in a healthy way only to have the slightest thing absolutely shatter their heart into pieces all over again for what must feel like the millionth time. At one point in the film, Marc shows the director a handful of items that belonged to his partner that he had kept and accidentally uncovers a stash of several of his partner’s notebooks that he had been unaware existed before that moment. You can pinpoint the exact frame and expression that clouds his face with the realization of how horrible he feels for stumbling across his partner’s keepsakes, doubled by the fact that he discovered them while being filmed. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter that the love of his life isn’t around to hide them anymore, those pages in which she scrawled down her thoughts, her notes for a project or just doodled in the margins still belong solely to her and should always belong only to her.
Bone Horn presents itself as a modern day take on that timeless classic - the pulp detective novel. At it’s beginning, the unnamed narrator, fresh off a career rebranding from the academic world to that of becoming a private investigator for hire, receives an phone call from a voice that will not identify themselves. The anonymous voice convinces the narrator to take on a case in which she must provide definitive proof that Alice B. Toklas, the long deceased partner of renowned Modernist writer/poet/socialite Gertrude Stein, had spent her entire life hiding the fact that she had a horn growing from her head.
I know that you’re already thinking that it’s a bizarre impetus to find yourself handed within the first few pages of a brand new book because I felt the exact same way when I first cracked my copy open. But I was also intrigued at where this entire line of thought that our author had presented us with was travelling and wanted to know why it was headed that direction. Thankfully, the story that follows after that fateful phone call isn’t just intriguing, insightful and incredibly heartfelt, it’s also deeply informative in it’s unabashed love and respect for not just the Modernism movement of the early 20th century, but also for the two women at the heart of the mystery, Gertrude and Alice.
Bone Horn may brand itself as and appear at first glance to be an updated take on the deliciously salacious detective novels of old, but in truth, it ends up being a triple threat of sorts. It is at once a frolic through the world of mystery, a crushing meditation on grief and also an examination on the power of gossip, rumour and intrigue and it’s ability to alter the strands of history. As you learn more about the life of Alice B. Toklas in the aftermath of Gertrude Stein’s passing in 1946, you are also made aware of the narrator having also recently lost her own partner, May, very suddenly. Alice’s response to the death of her one true love was to isolate herself from almost everyone while burying herself in the study of Gertrude’s unreleased work as she sold of pieces of their shared existence to keep herself afloat financially. Our narrator’s response is to abandon her career, have a child, train to become a private investigator and dip her toe in the world of emotionless one-night stands with various women.
As the story moves on and the mystery of Alice’s rumoured skull horn deepens with the narrator finding herself in various locales such as London, Paris and San Francisco, the parallels between her grief and the anguish that Alice experienced become much more clear. In searching for some record of Alice’s physical appearance that would confirm her anonymous donor’s request, she wades through decades of notes, photographs, essays, interviews, etc. that plumb the depths of Alice’s life with Gertrude and maybe more importantly, her life after Gertrude. Ultimately, grief becomes the defining character of this story in all of it’s forms as it washes over all of the characters that make up Bone Horn, touching each moment and colouring each decision made. In that same way that it was powerful yet awkward to watch as Marc Maron pushed through his pain to continue his craft and evolve as an artist and as a human, it’s a difficult and yet enlightening experience to walk alongside the narrator as she attempts to move forward with her life, both personally and professionally, in the only ways that she knows how.
Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain has crafted a story that is rich with historical touchstones that had me revisiting my well-worn copy of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons in tandem with my reading of Bone Horn. She not only manages to carry us on an intriguing adventure, but through the narrator espousing details about the lives of Gertrude and Alice and the wealth of assorted well-known individuals that passed through their universe, we are given a glimpse into two women at the forefront of first-wave feminism that serves to parallel aspects of the narrator’s own difficult journey while also providing stepping stones for readers to look outside of Bone Horn for a deeper understanding of these two remarkable icons.
August 14, 2026
I’m left confused by the actual plot of the book. I’m not sure if I’m the problem? I don’t understand if there is some sort of symbolism or whatever hidden underneath all the sex and the missing horn? I get that she’s “filling all the wrong holes” and having lots of sex with randos is some sort of grief response or something rather. I wanna know what was the point of it all.
September 13, 2025
I loved this smart and sexy book about an unnamed recently widowed, single mum and lesbian trying to find Alice B. Toklas's mythological horn. This a more layered detective story than we're used to seeing and as someone with a former literature degree, there was so much to enjoy as Stein and Toklas's story is uncovered as the PI's research moves from London, Paris and San Francisco. This book will make you think and feel!
December 30, 2025
I don't love it, I don't hate it. I just don't get it!! How Prudence wrote a 300+ page book about a mystery of a Horn I will never know. The mystery finished with an anti-climatic ending.. the main character had many more climaxes at higher altitudes than the ending of this book. We never found out who "the voice" was, never discovered the actual Horn, and we are left with a rather expected conclusion. The story is intricate at times, but overall the book just has lots of leads that end nowhere. The main character is just on a sex binge, miraculously sleeping with anyone she meets upon their first encounter. I do like the niche-ness of this book, it's storyline and it's main character (single windowed mother of a young toddler who is queer and journeying with Grief, forcing purpose through a wild and random side hustle: Private Investigating).
August 5, 2025
Fabulous! I’m every way. I won’t add more as don’t want to give anything away. Superb and heartfelt writing.
October 2, 2026
This book contains many of my favorite things: lesbians, archives, mysteries, bookstores, detective shows.
August 9, 2026
wonderful absurdist love letter to literary and art history. spoilers for my next staff pick.
August 15, 2026
4.5
Setting: UK/france/USA
Rep: lesbian protagonist
This is a strange book but it hit the right spot for me. I wasn't sure how a book about a PI searching for proof of a dead woman's purported horn was going to be sexy, but there was a surprising amount of sex in this book as the protagonist was on her archival journey. Odd premise, really well written, some excellent meditations on grief. Surprised so many are disliking it but I think they're trying to gauge more meaning and concreteness from it than it is offering.
Setting: UK/france/USA
Rep: lesbian protagonist
This is a strange book but it hit the right spot for me. I wasn't sure how a book about a PI searching for proof of a dead woman's purported horn was going to be sexy, but there was a surprising amount of sex in this book as the protagonist was on her archival journey. Odd premise, really well written, some excellent meditations on grief. Surprised so many are disliking it but I think they're trying to gauge more meaning and concreteness from it than it is offering.
July 6, 2026
I was browsing books at the bookbarge “Word on the Water” in London and saw the autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein, but didn’t like the edition they had on sale. I had some basic knowledge about Gertrude and Alice, and the year before laid a stone on their grave in Père Lachaise. So curious for more, I decided to ask if they happened to have another edition of it, they didn’t, but the sales assistant recommended me Bone Horn, giving me a warning that it was unconventional, but fun.
That’s how I ended up with this book, which I unlikely would’ve picked up anywhere else considering my location. As warned, it was unconventional, but fun. Very serious, but deeply unserious at the same time, part biography, part essay, part mystery, part rom com. All in all, a great Summer read and a good reminder to ask for recommendations at your local bookstore!
That’s how I ended up with this book, which I unlikely would’ve picked up anywhere else considering my location. As warned, it was unconventional, but fun. Very serious, but deeply unserious at the same time, part biography, part essay, part mystery, part rom com. All in all, a great Summer read and a good reminder to ask for recommendations at your local bookstore!
August 20, 2025
A fun and sexy read that plays fantastically with the lone detective archetype. Written by MY brilliant PhD supervisor!
August 13, 2026
Definitely heed the "sexy" part of the summary, because there is a LOT of sex in this book. A ridiculous amount. I understand someone acting recklessly through grief, but every single woman the MC encounters is immediately horny for her. Eventually I just wanted her to stay dressed and focus on the actual plot (which is basically just a research project on Toklas and Stein dressed up in a fiction disguise)
August 30, 2026
I received an ARC through NetGalley for an honest review of the audiobook.
I have absolutely housed this and I had a wonderful time with it!
I listened to the first hour or so in the bath and went from mildly intrigued to 'oh cool, this reminds me of Magic For Liars by Sarah Gailey' to 'ooh, interesting lesbian sex' to 'holy fuck, this writing about grief is breaking me!' and from 'this is fine' to 'utterly enthralled' by Frankie Porter's narration in one sitting.
I just adored he sardonic and amusing tone, the utter ridiculousness of the premise, the variety lesbian sex, and the absolutely staggering grief.
Frankie Porter's narration took a moment to *get* and then it was absolutely perfect.
Just a really, really good, weird, awful, and wonderful book!
I have absolutely housed this and I had a wonderful time with it!
I listened to the first hour or so in the bath and went from mildly intrigued to 'oh cool, this reminds me of Magic For Liars by Sarah Gailey' to 'ooh, interesting lesbian sex' to 'holy fuck, this writing about grief is breaking me!' and from 'this is fine' to 'utterly enthralled' by Frankie Porter's narration in one sitting.
I just adored he sardonic and amusing tone, the utter ridiculousness of the premise, the variety lesbian sex, and the absolutely staggering grief.
Frankie Porter's narration took a moment to *get* and then it was absolutely perfect.
Just a really, really good, weird, awful, and wonderful book!
Read
October 1, 2026lesbian PI investigates literary Modernist mystery? a satirical send-up of both academia and the detective genre (while still being full of heart and reflections on love and loss)? references to Buffy and to crip theory?? this book was made for me!! moving at moments, mostly strange and fun. some quirks of the writing: a few typos and a couple of very british-sounding americans. but still a hit for me!
September 13, 2026
Thank you Soft Skull and Brilliance Audio for my free ARC of Bone Horn by Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain — out now!
» READ IF YOU «
🦄 want a delightfully odd literary mystery
📚 love a queer FMC who does whatever she wants
💔 can handle grief and absurdity sharing the same page
» SYNOPSIS «
A brand new private investigator with a lot going on in her personal life takes on the strangest case of her career—she's asked to determine, once and for all, whether Alice B. Toklas really did have a horn in the middle of her forehead. The job will take her all over, London to Paris to San Francisco, chasing modernist history and confronting her own grief, turn by turn.
» REVIEW «
This book is DELIGHTFULLY, unapologetically strange, and I mean that as a compliment. I didn't read the synopsis fully and didn't really know what to expect from this story, but it sure gripped me from the beginning and I found myself fully invested in this odd little mystery journey. A detective novel built around Alice B. Toklas having a literal HORN probably shouldn't work, but Bussey-Chamberlain spins a wonderful little narrative about grief and histories.
There is just so much going on underneath the absurdity—the healing, the single-parenting, the "who am I now," the question of who gets to tell someone else's story. The tonal balance between heavy and hilarious could've easily collapsed, but it never does. The humor and the heartbreak take turns beautifully. It's an odd little gem of a book that is smart, funny, and a smidge devastating at times.
» RATING «
🦄 I'm Horned 🦄
» READ-A-LIKES «
• I Am Agatha by Nancy Foley
• The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez
• The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka
• Feud: Bette and Joan (TV series)
» READ IF YOU «
🦄 want a delightfully odd literary mystery
📚 love a queer FMC who does whatever she wants
💔 can handle grief and absurdity sharing the same page
» SYNOPSIS «
A brand new private investigator with a lot going on in her personal life takes on the strangest case of her career—she's asked to determine, once and for all, whether Alice B. Toklas really did have a horn in the middle of her forehead. The job will take her all over, London to Paris to San Francisco, chasing modernist history and confronting her own grief, turn by turn.
» REVIEW «
This book is DELIGHTFULLY, unapologetically strange, and I mean that as a compliment. I didn't read the synopsis fully and didn't really know what to expect from this story, but it sure gripped me from the beginning and I found myself fully invested in this odd little mystery journey. A detective novel built around Alice B. Toklas having a literal HORN probably shouldn't work, but Bussey-Chamberlain spins a wonderful little narrative about grief and histories.
There is just so much going on underneath the absurdity—the healing, the single-parenting, the "who am I now," the question of who gets to tell someone else's story. The tonal balance between heavy and hilarious could've easily collapsed, but it never does. The humor and the heartbreak take turns beautifully. It's an odd little gem of a book that is smart, funny, and a smidge devastating at times.
» RATING «
🦄 I'm Horned 🦄
» READ-A-LIKES «
• I Am Agatha by Nancy Foley
• The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez
• The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka
• Feud: Bette and Joan (TV series)
April 26, 2026
Very weird very mysterious very fun! A S Byatt's Possession meets Jack Reacher meets Greta & Valdin.
Borrowed from Matt.
Borrowed from Matt.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
What the Living Want From the Dead
“Bone Horn” turns a queer-modernist mystery into a searching novel about bereavement, archival desire, and the ethics of looking too closely.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | April 23rd, 2026
A horn is almost too good a premise. It arrives already wearing quotation marks, already halfway to anecdote, gossip, camp. Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain’s “Bone Horn” is smart enough to know that, and smarter still to know that the real subject of such a rumor is never the rumor alone. It is the appetite the rumor produces – for proof, for possession, for one more private fact wrestled from the dead. The question of whether Alice B. Toklas had a horn on her forehead matters here, but less than the question of what the living want from the bodies and papers of the dead, and what kinds of indignity they will dignify as scholarship, love, homage, or curiosity in order to get it.
Its narrator is a former academic in Brighton, newly improvised into private-investigator status, who is hired by an anonymous caller to determine whether Toklas really did have the horn Picasso supposedly joked about. She is exactly qualified enough to sound plausible – she wrote a PhD on literary modernism – and exactly broke enough to say yes. Her partner, May, died suddenly. She is now raising their small son alone, taking work where she can, measuring time in nursery pickups, fevers, invoices, interrupted sleep, and the desperate arithmetic by which grief becomes logistics. The fee matters in the plain, undignified way survival tends to matter. The client, who speaks in that distinctly academic register where secrecy and self-importance share a throat, wants an answer. The narrator wants the money. At first the job looks too ridiculous to turn costly.
A lesser novel would have treated the horn as a clever little novelty and left it there. Bussey-Chamberlain refuses the easy, knowing little book this setup might have produced. She lets the question stay ridiculous, but not trivial. The investigation begins sensibly enough: books, photographs, archives, Yale, the British Library, Paris, San Francisco, old letters, newer scholars, dead reputations, and the people who hoard access to all three. Along the way the narrator meets a Hemingway descendant with family papers and a taste for kitchen-table seduction; an American bookseller in Paris who suspects the horn may have been a cyst; a Yale archivist with an erotic relation to control; a Brighton police officer whose procedural suspicion spills quickly into other kinds of pressure; and, eventually, the people who know exactly what became of Toklas’s strange protrusion. The case keeps relocating its mess without losing its bruised comic timing.
On paper, “Bone Horn” sounds more whimsical than it is, because grief keeps turning its bright absurdity heavy. May’s death is not a decorative wound pinned to the narrator for depth and periodically consulted. It is the catastrophic fact that decides how every hour gets lived. It enters hospital waits, bath time, sexual encounters, airport departures, and the terrible vigilance of listening to a child breathe. The narrator’s son does not simply humanize her. He structures the novel’s time. Inquiry happens between childcare arrangements. Research is interrupted by illness. Travel is measured against the body of a toddler who still needs lifting, washing, soothing, returning to sleep. This is not backdrop. It is form.
That matters because one of the novel’s sharpest achievements lies in the way it binds the narrator’s overworked present to Toklas’s historical one. Bussey-Chamberlain is not interested in turning Alice into a saint of neglected wives. She is too exact, and too suspicious of rehabilitation by slogan, for that. But she is deeply interested in the work history stuffs into the kitchen and then pretends not to see: typing, editing, gatekeeping, arranging, withholding, smoothing over, making genius function on time. Toklas appears as secretary, wife, bodyguard, collaborator, obstacle, scapegoat, and screen onto which others project ugliness, secrecy, loyalty, and blame. The horn only intensifies that dynamic. It makes her body one more site onto which ridicule, curiosity, and interpretation can fasten themselves.
That doubleness – the narrator’s daily labor of care beside Toklas’s historical labor of maintenance – keeps the novel from admiring its own setup too openly. “Bone Horn” knows that there is something faintly indecent in its own premise, and it keeps that indecency in view. The horn is funny. The horn is pathetic. The horn is a lure. The horn is also the latest form taken by an old habit: everyone wants something from Alice. Some want proximity to Stein. Some want gossip. Some want grievance. Some want proof. Nearly everyone wants to make use of her.
Bussey-Chamberlain’s prose is a large part of why the novel survives the dangerousness of its premise. She writes in a live-wire first person capable of moving from literary gossip to childcare to explicit sex to exhausted comedy without sounding patched together. The sentences alternate between dry snaps and longer runs of associative intelligence. A clause can land like a shrug. Then the line lengthens and memory, resentment, criticism, lust, and fatigue all start crowding the same breath. The style catches thought before thought can dress for company. It is one of the few contemporary first-person voices that can sound both genuinely learned and genuinely frazzled without making either quality a performance.
It also refuses to prettify anything. Weak coffee, mud, blood, milk, towels, nursery viruses, archive dust, train seats, bad lighting, damp stairwells, overfamiliar bars – all of it stays in frame. That refusal gives the novel its weight. Literary weirdness is never allowed to float free of bodily life. Even the book’s erotic scenes, which are frequent, explicit, and often very funny, do not arrive as glamorous release valves. They are folded into grief, loneliness, self-experiment, misrecognition, bodily need, the wish to surrender, the wish to disappear, the wish to feel one’s own edges again. There is, at moments, something of Jen Beagin’s “Big Swiss” in the scorched erotic intelligence here, the willingness to let damage and wit occupy the same sentence. But Bussey-Chamberlain is sadder, more archival, and much less interested in turning the social world into a parade of grotesques for our amusement. Her people can be outlandish, but they are not merely satiric furniture.
Formally, the novel is doing more than its playfulness first suggests. The short chapters keep the material mobile. The embedded documents – emails, case reports, transcribed notes, archival requests – do not merely vary the texture of the page. They sharpen the novel’s obsession with mediation. Papers are never only papers here. They are leverage, longing, instruction, inheritance, concealment, proof, trap. The case-report chapter is especially good: an apparently official resolution of the horn mystery repeatedly interrupted by bracketed reminders that the investigator is also a tired mother with a small child and no stable wall between work and survival. Records flatten. Living refuses to stay flat. Few contemporary novels dramatize that friction so cleanly.
The middle section does, however, ease off. The rhythm of lead, library, bar, sex, grief reflection, fresh lead begins to recur a little too recognizably before the plot fully hardens again. Because the narrator’s mind is such good company, these pages remain lively. Even so, they reveal the novel trusting voice to carry stretches that might otherwise have been tightened. A few secondary characters blaze vividly in a scene without quite deepening beyond the work they need to do in the plot’s relay system. That is not fatal. But it is noticeable.
Then comes the book’s biggest gamble. After an apparent solution in which the horn proves to have been a surgically removed cyst, after a break-in at the narrator’s office, after transatlantic digging through archives and anecdotes, and after the revelation that the whole scholarly chase began in an academic prank, the novel plunges into collector-gothic. The narrator returns to Paris, tries to dig up Toklas’s grave, is struck down, and wakes to learn that the horn was real after all: removed from Toklas’s body after death and preserved in a wealthy family’s private collection of rare body parts.
It is a late pivot, and the bill comes due. Some readers will balk. Fair enough. You can see the join. The move risks reducing a novel that has been alive to the murkiness of motive into something cleaner and more schematic than it had previously been. The secret body-part collection is a sensational object. It is also, for a while, a simplifying one. The book’s social and emotional complexity briefly narrows into a more arranged form of menace.
And yet as metaphor the move is mercilessly exact. Bussey-Chamberlain has spent the entire novel asking who gets to lay claim to the dead – who controls the papers, who edits the record, who inherits the art, who decides what counts as proof, who gets to turn another person’s remains into an argument. The collector family literalizes what scholarship, love, curation, and fandom have already been doing figuratively. What those other systems do with papers, rumors, letters, and anecdotes, the collectors do with the body itself. The dead are not only read here. They are catalogued, claimed, and, finally, harvested. That is lurid, yes. It is also the novel’s coldest and clearest thought.
The ending earns itself by refusing the reward the plot seems to promise. The narrator does not get to restore Alice to history in some triumphant revisionist blaze. Proof exists, but it cannot circulate. The anonymous scholar who hired her is forced into silence. The horn is both recovered and hidden again. That refusal matters. It keeps the novel from mistaking disclosure for justice. More than that, it clarifies what the book has been after all along. “Bone Horn” is not really a mystery about whether a famous writer’s wife had an unusual growth on her forehead. It is a novel about the indecency beneath respectable curiosity. It is about what grief wants from traces. It is about the moral slippage between preserving, studying, touching, owning, and using. It is about the appetite that calls itself love when it is feeling tender and scholarship when it is feeling vain.
What Bussey-Chamberlain sees, and declines to sentimentalize, is how close those appetites can sit to one another. The narrator wants traces of May that do not exist. Scholars want access, authority, revelation. Archives want custody. Collectors want possession. Readers, too, want more than the premise first advertises. We want the horn to matter. The novel knows that appetite can be touching and grubby at once. It cannot quite claim the luxury of disdain, because it implicates everyone in the room, including itself. That is part of its intelligence.
I land at 84/100, or 4 stars: a novel of real distinction, real force, and a few places where the join flashes into view. What survives it is not merely the bait, though Toklas’s horn is certainly bait made to draw blood. It is the image the book has been arranging in the dark all along: a hole left in a skull where something once was, and the humiliating old wish to believe that, if we could only find it, name it, and hold it up to the light, the dead might finally give up one last usable secret.
“Bone Horn” turns a queer-modernist mystery into a searching novel about bereavement, archival desire, and the ethics of looking too closely.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | April 23rd, 2026
A horn is almost too good a premise. It arrives already wearing quotation marks, already halfway to anecdote, gossip, camp. Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain’s “Bone Horn” is smart enough to know that, and smarter still to know that the real subject of such a rumor is never the rumor alone. It is the appetite the rumor produces – for proof, for possession, for one more private fact wrestled from the dead. The question of whether Alice B. Toklas had a horn on her forehead matters here, but less than the question of what the living want from the bodies and papers of the dead, and what kinds of indignity they will dignify as scholarship, love, homage, or curiosity in order to get it.
Its narrator is a former academic in Brighton, newly improvised into private-investigator status, who is hired by an anonymous caller to determine whether Toklas really did have the horn Picasso supposedly joked about. She is exactly qualified enough to sound plausible – she wrote a PhD on literary modernism – and exactly broke enough to say yes. Her partner, May, died suddenly. She is now raising their small son alone, taking work where she can, measuring time in nursery pickups, fevers, invoices, interrupted sleep, and the desperate arithmetic by which grief becomes logistics. The fee matters in the plain, undignified way survival tends to matter. The client, who speaks in that distinctly academic register where secrecy and self-importance share a throat, wants an answer. The narrator wants the money. At first the job looks too ridiculous to turn costly.
A lesser novel would have treated the horn as a clever little novelty and left it there. Bussey-Chamberlain refuses the easy, knowing little book this setup might have produced. She lets the question stay ridiculous, but not trivial. The investigation begins sensibly enough: books, photographs, archives, Yale, the British Library, Paris, San Francisco, old letters, newer scholars, dead reputations, and the people who hoard access to all three. Along the way the narrator meets a Hemingway descendant with family papers and a taste for kitchen-table seduction; an American bookseller in Paris who suspects the horn may have been a cyst; a Yale archivist with an erotic relation to control; a Brighton police officer whose procedural suspicion spills quickly into other kinds of pressure; and, eventually, the people who know exactly what became of Toklas’s strange protrusion. The case keeps relocating its mess without losing its bruised comic timing.
On paper, “Bone Horn” sounds more whimsical than it is, because grief keeps turning its bright absurdity heavy. May’s death is not a decorative wound pinned to the narrator for depth and periodically consulted. It is the catastrophic fact that decides how every hour gets lived. It enters hospital waits, bath time, sexual encounters, airport departures, and the terrible vigilance of listening to a child breathe. The narrator’s son does not simply humanize her. He structures the novel’s time. Inquiry happens between childcare arrangements. Research is interrupted by illness. Travel is measured against the body of a toddler who still needs lifting, washing, soothing, returning to sleep. This is not backdrop. It is form.
That matters because one of the novel’s sharpest achievements lies in the way it binds the narrator’s overworked present to Toklas’s historical one. Bussey-Chamberlain is not interested in turning Alice into a saint of neglected wives. She is too exact, and too suspicious of rehabilitation by slogan, for that. But she is deeply interested in the work history stuffs into the kitchen and then pretends not to see: typing, editing, gatekeeping, arranging, withholding, smoothing over, making genius function on time. Toklas appears as secretary, wife, bodyguard, collaborator, obstacle, scapegoat, and screen onto which others project ugliness, secrecy, loyalty, and blame. The horn only intensifies that dynamic. It makes her body one more site onto which ridicule, curiosity, and interpretation can fasten themselves.
That doubleness – the narrator’s daily labor of care beside Toklas’s historical labor of maintenance – keeps the novel from admiring its own setup too openly. “Bone Horn” knows that there is something faintly indecent in its own premise, and it keeps that indecency in view. The horn is funny. The horn is pathetic. The horn is a lure. The horn is also the latest form taken by an old habit: everyone wants something from Alice. Some want proximity to Stein. Some want gossip. Some want grievance. Some want proof. Nearly everyone wants to make use of her.
Bussey-Chamberlain’s prose is a large part of why the novel survives the dangerousness of its premise. She writes in a live-wire first person capable of moving from literary gossip to childcare to explicit sex to exhausted comedy without sounding patched together. The sentences alternate between dry snaps and longer runs of associative intelligence. A clause can land like a shrug. Then the line lengthens and memory, resentment, criticism, lust, and fatigue all start crowding the same breath. The style catches thought before thought can dress for company. It is one of the few contemporary first-person voices that can sound both genuinely learned and genuinely frazzled without making either quality a performance.
It also refuses to prettify anything. Weak coffee, mud, blood, milk, towels, nursery viruses, archive dust, train seats, bad lighting, damp stairwells, overfamiliar bars – all of it stays in frame. That refusal gives the novel its weight. Literary weirdness is never allowed to float free of bodily life. Even the book’s erotic scenes, which are frequent, explicit, and often very funny, do not arrive as glamorous release valves. They are folded into grief, loneliness, self-experiment, misrecognition, bodily need, the wish to surrender, the wish to disappear, the wish to feel one’s own edges again. There is, at moments, something of Jen Beagin’s “Big Swiss” in the scorched erotic intelligence here, the willingness to let damage and wit occupy the same sentence. But Bussey-Chamberlain is sadder, more archival, and much less interested in turning the social world into a parade of grotesques for our amusement. Her people can be outlandish, but they are not merely satiric furniture.
Formally, the novel is doing more than its playfulness first suggests. The short chapters keep the material mobile. The embedded documents – emails, case reports, transcribed notes, archival requests – do not merely vary the texture of the page. They sharpen the novel’s obsession with mediation. Papers are never only papers here. They are leverage, longing, instruction, inheritance, concealment, proof, trap. The case-report chapter is especially good: an apparently official resolution of the horn mystery repeatedly interrupted by bracketed reminders that the investigator is also a tired mother with a small child and no stable wall between work and survival. Records flatten. Living refuses to stay flat. Few contemporary novels dramatize that friction so cleanly.
The middle section does, however, ease off. The rhythm of lead, library, bar, sex, grief reflection, fresh lead begins to recur a little too recognizably before the plot fully hardens again. Because the narrator’s mind is such good company, these pages remain lively. Even so, they reveal the novel trusting voice to carry stretches that might otherwise have been tightened. A few secondary characters blaze vividly in a scene without quite deepening beyond the work they need to do in the plot’s relay system. That is not fatal. But it is noticeable.
Then comes the book’s biggest gamble. After an apparent solution in which the horn proves to have been a surgically removed cyst, after a break-in at the narrator’s office, after transatlantic digging through archives and anecdotes, and after the revelation that the whole scholarly chase began in an academic prank, the novel plunges into collector-gothic. The narrator returns to Paris, tries to dig up Toklas’s grave, is struck down, and wakes to learn that the horn was real after all: removed from Toklas’s body after death and preserved in a wealthy family’s private collection of rare body parts.
It is a late pivot, and the bill comes due. Some readers will balk. Fair enough. You can see the join. The move risks reducing a novel that has been alive to the murkiness of motive into something cleaner and more schematic than it had previously been. The secret body-part collection is a sensational object. It is also, for a while, a simplifying one. The book’s social and emotional complexity briefly narrows into a more arranged form of menace.
And yet as metaphor the move is mercilessly exact. Bussey-Chamberlain has spent the entire novel asking who gets to lay claim to the dead – who controls the papers, who edits the record, who inherits the art, who decides what counts as proof, who gets to turn another person’s remains into an argument. The collector family literalizes what scholarship, love, curation, and fandom have already been doing figuratively. What those other systems do with papers, rumors, letters, and anecdotes, the collectors do with the body itself. The dead are not only read here. They are catalogued, claimed, and, finally, harvested. That is lurid, yes. It is also the novel’s coldest and clearest thought.
The ending earns itself by refusing the reward the plot seems to promise. The narrator does not get to restore Alice to history in some triumphant revisionist blaze. Proof exists, but it cannot circulate. The anonymous scholar who hired her is forced into silence. The horn is both recovered and hidden again. That refusal matters. It keeps the novel from mistaking disclosure for justice. More than that, it clarifies what the book has been after all along. “Bone Horn” is not really a mystery about whether a famous writer’s wife had an unusual growth on her forehead. It is a novel about the indecency beneath respectable curiosity. It is about what grief wants from traces. It is about the moral slippage between preserving, studying, touching, owning, and using. It is about the appetite that calls itself love when it is feeling tender and scholarship when it is feeling vain.
What Bussey-Chamberlain sees, and declines to sentimentalize, is how close those appetites can sit to one another. The narrator wants traces of May that do not exist. Scholars want access, authority, revelation. Archives want custody. Collectors want possession. Readers, too, want more than the premise first advertises. We want the horn to matter. The novel knows that appetite can be touching and grubby at once. It cannot quite claim the luxury of disdain, because it implicates everyone in the room, including itself. That is part of its intelligence.
I land at 84/100, or 4 stars: a novel of real distinction, real force, and a few places where the join flashes into view. What survives it is not merely the bait, though Toklas’s horn is certainly bait made to draw blood. It is the image the book has been arranging in the dark all along: a hole left in a skull where something once was, and the humiliating old wish to believe that, if we could only find it, name it, and hold it up to the light, the dead might finally give up one last usable secret.
December 7, 2025
This was silly and fun and gay and I ate it up!! but I have to say I’m feeling very prude gen Z about the sex scenes - they were totally unnecessary lol like one would have made the point, less detail would have been fine and I didn’t need to read about fisting
September 19, 2026
I wanted to love this book for the community’s sake but my god was it hard for me to get through. Loved the last 50 pages but the first 250 were wildly repetitive. Cant rate a book about lesbianism less than 3 stars, and I suppose it made me think, but overall I wouldn’t go back for seconds.
October 14, 2025
Pretty good! Very fast and intuitive
Lots of sex
Lots of sex
July 10, 2026
This was a lovely detective novel with a literary and lesbian angle to it - our main is a recently widowed lesbian mother who is commissioned to try to find the horn of Alice Toklas. Fun lesbian sex, neat literary knowledge drops, and a little bit of danger towards the end. Lovely library read.
January 12, 2026
would be a 1.5 star rating if GR allowed for it. it's not smart, it's not sexy and it's the first time i have been disappointed by a sapphic book that is written by a sapphic woman.
somehow i think this was one of the most disappointing books i've ever read. i dont like being overly negative about someone's writing - after all, it was at some point in time a passion project - but wow i have never been so put off by an author's use of language. i'm not one for remembering quotes too accurately (and i'm not about to go and read through again for the sake of writing this review), but from the first few pages of the book, all i can recall is there being an indie coffee shop selling a "new chai latte" and an independent cinema that had "just finished showing a Wes Anderson movie". yikes. for a moment i thought it was ironic, squeezing in as many quirky pop culture references as possible, but the rest of the book just continued to prove that instinct wrong.
all of this AND the fact that the author is a senior creative writing lecturer?????? girl no
somehow i think this was one of the most disappointing books i've ever read. i dont like being overly negative about someone's writing - after all, it was at some point in time a passion project - but wow i have never been so put off by an author's use of language. i'm not one for remembering quotes too accurately (and i'm not about to go and read through again for the sake of writing this review), but from the first few pages of the book, all i can recall is there being an indie coffee shop selling a "new chai latte" and an independent cinema that had "just finished showing a Wes Anderson movie". yikes. for a moment i thought it was ironic, squeezing in as many quirky pop culture references as possible, but the rest of the book just continued to prove that instinct wrong.
all of this AND the fact that the author is a senior creative writing lecturer?????? girl no
January 13, 2026
Just finished it. Frustratingly slow, nothing happens, and didn’t care about the characters. The plot twist of the horn existing and being in a past lovers possession didn’t affect me because I couldn’t remember her due to the protagonist dropping her knickers for everyone she spoke two words to who were all duplicates of one another. No character development, struggled to feel any empathy for her. Big rush of unrealistic happenings at the end just to close it off. Nice imagery at times. Good commentary on political/societal effects on academia
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 6, 2025
i know very little about alice b. toklas, so i didn’t expect to be so into through this strange story of a private investigator looking into her alleged horn.
funny, sexy and poignant, this book was like nothing i’ve ever read before.
funny, sexy and poignant, this book was like nothing i’ve ever read before.
June 27, 2025
Bone Horn.
This debut novel expertly treads myriad thin lines which are famously difficult to navigate: between a gripping and fun romp and a settled, painful reading of queer grief, queer (and single) parenthood and power. The young, fun, gay detective has a PhD and books a train to Paris to investigate a rumoured horn on the forehead of a long-dead famous lesbian. But first she must organise childcare.
Just as it all gets heavy, like the protagonist’s refusal to give in to listening to more than 2 songs worth of ‘grief music’, the author switches on the crime drama, the mystery. The absurd premise is somehow made good in this way: a horn lost since the 60’s over which academics may kill, rob and destroy? It works.
Power, sex, literature in queer history is well balanced against a version of modern single lesbian parenthood which does not shy away from the deep-dug ditch of grief at the centre of the protagonist’s whole being, as hidden yet consuming as a horn secreted under a thick fringe.
One cannot come away from Bone Horn without reigniting an interest in Stein and Toklas, and neither can one come away without holding one’s loved ones tighter for a while. In pride month, too - an awareness of the gap between saying and doing, for queer parents, queer academics, historians. This is not a book which is swaddled in rainbows and glitter, or a picture-polished lesbian families. One finishes Bone Horn knowing there is more to do, more to say and to find, in history as in modernity.
It’s also just, super fun and exciting. The thing with feathers is both grief and hope. It’s absurd, it’s gripping, and I look forward to the rumoured next adventure with excitement.
This debut novel expertly treads myriad thin lines which are famously difficult to navigate: between a gripping and fun romp and a settled, painful reading of queer grief, queer (and single) parenthood and power. The young, fun, gay detective has a PhD and books a train to Paris to investigate a rumoured horn on the forehead of a long-dead famous lesbian. But first she must organise childcare.
Just as it all gets heavy, like the protagonist’s refusal to give in to listening to more than 2 songs worth of ‘grief music’, the author switches on the crime drama, the mystery. The absurd premise is somehow made good in this way: a horn lost since the 60’s over which academics may kill, rob and destroy? It works.
Power, sex, literature in queer history is well balanced against a version of modern single lesbian parenthood which does not shy away from the deep-dug ditch of grief at the centre of the protagonist’s whole being, as hidden yet consuming as a horn secreted under a thick fringe.
One cannot come away from Bone Horn without reigniting an interest in Stein and Toklas, and neither can one come away without holding one’s loved ones tighter for a while. In pride month, too - an awareness of the gap between saying and doing, for queer parents, queer academics, historians. This is not a book which is swaddled in rainbows and glitter, or a picture-polished lesbian families. One finishes Bone Horn knowing there is more to do, more to say and to find, in history as in modernity.
It’s also just, super fun and exciting. The thing with feathers is both grief and hope. It’s absurd, it’s gripping, and I look forward to the rumoured next adventure with excitement.
September 25, 2026
3.25. Hmm, I'm not sure what to think! I kept feeling like there was something I wasn't quite "getting" about this book. Like, how is it that every woman (or trans person) the narrator meets wants to have sex with her within the first 10 minutes of meeting and vice verse? Why so much sex period? Is this a play on the detective novel trope of the hyper-sexed PI or is it supposed to be semi-serious or what? Also, for me the romantic grief and single mothering stories did not mix well with the detective story. Also, I found some of the descriptions very strange, starting with the first page and the voice like a hard-boiled egg. What does that mean? Or is it deliberately nonsensical (possibly Stein-ian?) Some of the grammatical constructions were also strange or just plain incorrect (tsk tsk to the English PhD author!) The bone horn conceit wore thin for me by the middle of the book, especially after it's revealed what the likely historical truth of the situation was. Maybe I just don't like absurdism?
Despite these complaints, I found this novel quite addictive. For some reason this was the third book in the last month I've read about Stein, Toklas, and their circle-- the other two being "My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein" and "A Vast Horizon", and I enjoyed learning even more about them (the odd incident with Hemingway, for example!) The novel was often quite funny, and I share the author's addiction to crime shows. I live in the SF Bay Area and have spent quite a bit of time in Paris, so the travelogue parts were fun too.
Despite these complaints, I found this novel quite addictive. For some reason this was the third book in the last month I've read about Stein, Toklas, and their circle-- the other two being "My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein" and "A Vast Horizon", and I enjoyed learning even more about them (the odd incident with Hemingway, for example!) The novel was often quite funny, and I share the author's addiction to crime shows. I live in the SF Bay Area and have spent quite a bit of time in Paris, so the travelogue parts were fun too.
Read
August 12, 20264.25⭐️
🎧The narration by Frankie Porter was so fantastic that - in one book - she’s made it onto my favorite narrators list ⏳7 hours + 12 min
A private detective who is widowed and raising a kid all on her own, gets a weird job digging into a historical conspiracy theory for a mysterious client.
💭 Is it masochistic to love anything that will die?
🗯️’I started counting my distance by counting, not in ground that needed to be covered, but by how long it might take me to get there, the speed and terrible problems that can escalate’
🔎 Explore
Guilt
🥐 Avant-Garde
🏳️🌈 Queer history
💻 Historical conspiracy theories
📚 Ruthless academia archives
💺 Gertrude Stein & Alice B Toklas
I loved how succinct the story was, but I was a little taken aback by how quickly it ended though
🎧The narration by Frankie Porter was so fantastic that - in one book - she’s made it onto my favorite narrators list ⏳7 hours + 12 min
A private detective who is widowed and raising a kid all on her own, gets a weird job digging into a historical conspiracy theory for a mysterious client.
💭 Is it masochistic to love anything that will die?
🗯️’I started counting my distance by counting, not in ground that needed to be covered, but by how long it might take me to get there, the speed and terrible problems that can escalate’
🔎 Explore
Guilt
🥐 Avant-Garde
🏳️🌈 Queer history
💻 Historical conspiracy theories
📚 Ruthless academia archives
💺 Gertrude Stein & Alice B Toklas
I loved how succinct the story was, but I was a little taken aback by how quickly it ended though
September 6, 2026
Ultimately liked this but the humor is extremely dry and rare for such a weird/funny premise. The PI main character is pretty detached emotionally, but it eventually makes sense as to why she's so detached (though not cold, which I appreciated)...I'm partially frustrated because I've been running into cold. detached women main characters constantly while reading books with either 1) insane premises or 2) spots on "weird girl literature" lists.
The mystery itself was entertaining enough and as our main character investigates, she falls into a series of queer entanglements in a very masc, old-school noir way, which I loved. Tons of throwaway lines to Twilight and Autostraddle. Definitely a descendant of Sarah Schulman's "The Sophie Horowitz Story," which I did love.
The mystery itself was entertaining enough and as our main character investigates, she falls into a series of queer entanglements in a very masc, old-school noir way, which I loved. Tons of throwaway lines to Twilight and Autostraddle. Definitely a descendant of Sarah Schulman's "The Sophie Horowitz Story," which I did love.
August 25, 2026
Received as a NetGalley ALC
Bone Horn is a story that asks what would happen if a PI who vibes bottom was to asked to investigate a niche historical rumour while slogging through waves of unprocessed grief. The result is an absurdist take on the tortured investigator trope where the MC's recent immergence from isolation following the death of her wife is contrasted with her ability to draw out information and assistance through a series of appointments and assignations. Bussey-Chamberlain has created a character who is immensely capable but also inclined to let life happen to her and simply move on in an attempt to control what and who affects her.
Bone Horn is a story that asks what would happen if a PI who vibes bottom was to asked to investigate a niche historical rumour while slogging through waves of unprocessed grief. The result is an absurdist take on the tortured investigator trope where the MC's recent immergence from isolation following the death of her wife is contrasted with her ability to draw out information and assistance through a series of appointments and assignations. Bussey-Chamberlain has created a character who is immensely capable but also inclined to let life happen to her and simply move on in an attempt to control what and who affects her.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 48 reviews