Blade and Bone

by Catherine Johnson

A forensic crime thriller set in Revolutionary Paris.Young surgeon Ezra McAdam must hasten to Paris to rescue his friend Loveday Finch and her charge Mahmoud, the Ottoman prince, who have been caught up in the Revolution. On the way, Ezra experiences the war first hand on the battlefields of Northern France, where his surgical skills are in high demand by the beleaguered French army. Meanwhile, in Paris, the guillotine is busy, and the medical world is finding the surfeit of bodies useful to its research into the seat of life. Ezra is not persuaded by the controversial theories of his French colleagues, but his mind is on other matters. Finding Loveday and Mahmoud is proving harder than he had it would appear that Paris really is the most dangerous place on earth. Ezra’s search takes him from the grand Hotel Dieu to the dark catacombs below the city; from the opulent War Office to the tall, forbidding Conciergerie – the city prison – here he must undertake the most audacious rescue attempt of all.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Young Adult, Historical

240 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 6, 2016

About the author

Catherine Johnson is a British author and screenwriter known for her young adult fiction and work in film, television and radio. Born in London to a Jamaican father and Welsh mother, she studied film at St Martin's School of Art before publishing her debut novel, The Last Welsh Summer (1993). She has since written around 20 novels, including works on Arctic explorer Matthew Henson, and won the 2019 Little Rebels Award for Freedom. Her historical novel Sawbones (2013) earned multiple shortlistings and the Young Quills Award. Johnson co-wrote the screenplay for Bullet Boy (2004) with Saul Dibb, and has served as Royal Literary Fund Fellow, Writer in Residence at Holloway Prison, and judge for the Jhalak Prize. In 2019, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Reviews

[Kirsty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed it.

[Debra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Super sequel to Sawbones but it could be read as a stand-alone. We follow Ezra as he goes to Paris to discover what's happened to Loveday and Mahmood. It is the time of the French Revolution and we are not spared any of the horrors of The Terror (might want to warn younger readers). Ezra takes up the offer he had in Sawbones, to visit the Hotel Dieu and see their surgeons in action. He meets one surgeon who Ezra soon realises puts medical discovery above human life and yet Ezra has to rely on him when Loveday gets into serious trouble. It's a fast-paced adventure full of twists and turns and yet challenges the reader to think about what freedom is and what people fight for. Good reading.

[Nicole · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was great and really cool.

[Beccy · Rating 5 out of 5]

True rating; 4.75 stars

A perfectly formed small novel, my only criticism would be because it was so well written I could have had more and the smaller novel length does make it very fast paced - could have benefited from some brief pauses.

But this had me cheering because it just goes to show that some novels do not need to be so long. People just aren't hiring, or listening to, the right editors.

[Natalia · Rating 3 out of 5]

An enjoyable read, and about a black MC during the French Revolution too. Definitely need more stories on poc in revolutionary France.

[Jeremy Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

An exhilarating story about Ezra McAdams looking for his friends Mahmoud and Loveday during the revolution in Paris, France. And as an Englishman, Ezra, in Paris, has always had his one foot inside a grave. Embarking on a journey through the cobblestoned and murky streets of Paris, Ezra and his friends battled many problems and solving them in an unconventional manners, much to Ezra’s profession.

I really like this book, and knowing that there’s a prequel to this book (not really a prequel but something that ties the two novels together), I would like to read it as well, because it tells the start of friendship between Loveday and Ezra (and I assume with Mahmoud).

This is not much of a review but Luc is my favorite character in the novel. He was so cute and lively and his one liners especially to Ezra made the novel fun. And I promised to myself that if Luc died, I would riot but he didn’t. He only lost his one leg.

[Claire · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bought this book a few days ago for not a lot of money and as it was very short I thought it would be a quick easy read to help me get out of my current reading slump.

I liked the backdrop of the French Revolution, it really upped the stakes of the story and I also really liked the characters too.

However I wasn’t overly invested in the story so even though it had its merits it was only an average read for me. Not a bad book but perhaps suited better to someone who reads a lot more historical fiction than I do.

[martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

An enjoyable and fast paced adventure aimed at young adult readers, that effortlessly and convincingly uses a young man of colour as its protagonist - a young and gifted surgeon who was previously a Caribbean slave. Not as unlikely a premise as our modern cultural conditioning would have us think!

It’s gory but fun and suitable for teenagers from all backgrounds - but will obviously speak particularly to children able to identify themselves with the hero’s ethnicity.

Good fun; in fact I wish it’d been longer

[Rakie Keig · Rating 4 out of 5]

Didn't realise this was a sequel, but it worked pretty well on its own, and I'll probably be checking out the first book in the series now. My only complaint is that the pace was sometimes TOO fast for me - I would've liked more time to catch my breath while reading, while the characters want to race from one exciting incident to another without pause. :)

[Melissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not quite as good as sawbones but liked the historical context and some may enjoy the gruesome experiments!

[Elizabeth Jayne · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the sequel to Sawbones, brilliant.

[Sarah Capasso · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great sequel and also completely different to the first book. Would happily read more about the stories of Ezra and Loveday.

[Kym · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant. Pretty graphic (for a young adult book) but also very immersive; you feel like you are wandering around 18th century Paris amid revolution. Liberty, equality, fraternity!

[Thornton Rigg · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this sequel to Sawbones (published in 2013), Catherine moves her characters from c18th England to c18th France and we follow the young surgeon, Ezra McAdam, to Revolutionary Paris. Here, the English are the enemy and Citizen Renaud is anxious to involve Ezra in his reanimation experiments for which the "National Razor" is creating a steady supply.

In this dangerous city of harsh poverty and unpredictable violence, can Ezra find and rescue his friends: the impetuous Loveday and high handed Prince Mahmoud?

Blade and Bone is a thrilling adventure involving complex, believable characters with an intriguing background of c18th fact. Catherine has a lightness of touch and she deploys her considerable knowledge to colour the story without weighing down the narrative. I particularly enjoyed the dashing Lieutenant Colonel Dumas of the American Regiment - a real person and, as Catherine explains in her epilogue, still today the highest ranking soldier of African descent in any European army. She has written more detail about the man here, in The History Girls blog.

Highly recommended.

Cover design moment: I loved this cover with its old engraving style and the clever use of colour to create a Tricolour impression. The wonderful illustrator is Royston Knipe. His website is here.

Blade and Bone was published on 6 October 2016 by Walker Books.

[sassafrass · Rating 3 out of 5]

I know you aren't supposed to judge a book by its cover but my god the cover art really drew me in on this one! Everything from the positioning to the colour scheme (red, white and blue) to the title font was absolutely perfect.

I loved the story, but my only issue is that this is marketed as a standalone but is quite clearly a sequel to another novel - Sawbones. Whilst you could get into the plot easily enough, it was clear the characters had been on other adventures with each other previously, and it was harder to connect with them all because of that.

[Philip S Davies · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Teen Fiction Reading Group I attend chose this title not realising it is a sequel to "Sawbones". Not having read the previous book, I missed some of the character introduction, but found Ezra McAdam and Loveday Finch to be likeable and interesting enough protagonists. I think I would have preferred Loveday as the viewpoint character instead of Ezra. I also enjoyed the setting of 1793 Revolutionary Paris as a dangerous place for our heroes to be. I found the plot didn't flow very well, and I lost sympathy with the main characters when they kept on getting themselves into serious trouble simply by being reckless and foolish. This story is a good introduction to the Terror of the French Revolution, and a passably good read.