She seems to have another plan for the monsters entirely. A bard finds her so he can tell her story, beginning with his amazement that Tea is no longer afraid of the daeva she'd been trained to kill. Chapters weave back and forth between Tea as an apprentice until age 15 and Tea, age 17, living as a hermit in caves on a distant beach. As her mentor Mykaela's health begins to fail, Tea readies herself to face her first daeva without her mentor's help. From Mykaela she learns how to control and communicate with the dead, in preparation for her life raising and then killing monsters called daeva who regenerate every few years and kill anything in their path as part of an old curse. Even though Tea is set apart from the other asha with her darker brand of magic, she's still taught everything an asha in high society must know: dancing, singing, flower arranging, and history but also fighting. With her brother as her walking-dead familiar, she becomes the apprentice of the bone witch, Mykaela, one of the last in existence, traveling to a new kingdom and entering the world of asha/witch training. In her grief, she draws a rune automatically and raises him from the dead. In THE BONE WITCH, Tea finds out she has dark magic powers at her brother's funeral. Men drink heavily in tea houses, but most girls there to entertain them refrain from drinking wine until they're 16. A romantic subplot exists, but the flirting is very mild. Tea shows her strength when she is supposed to be more beauty than brawn and encourages a male friend to pursue the arts, even though it is against the usual gender roles of their society. Tea studies hard and sacrifices much to learn her craft, even though she's shunned for the kind of magic she can wield in some circles. Soldiers and others die with stories of some daeva ripping people apart, though the book usually refrains from gory descriptions. The bone witches train to raise monsters called daeva and kill them before they regenerate completely from their last death and terrorize whole villages.

When she raises her brother by accident, a bone witch takes Tea on as an apprentice. Here, main character Tea is a witch who can raise the dead.

Parents need to know that The Bone Witch is the first in a series by Rin Chupeco, author of the ghost story The Girl from the Well.

The bone witch book 3