Lora Senf: "Unnamed Bones" (ARC Review)

Title: Unnamed Bones [on Amazon | on Goodreads]
Series: None
Author: Lora Senf [Site | Goodreads]
Genres: Supernatural
Year: 2026
Age: 14+
Stars: 4/5
Pros: Puts a refreshing, poignant spin on a familiar premise. Explores themes of mental health, grief, inner strength and human connection. Doesn't waste time with unnecessary romance.
Cons: The horror scenario feels a tad too formulaic at first.   
WARNING! Drowning, body horror/botanical horror, blood and gore/injuries, self-harm, suicide, fire/burning, vomiting. Depression, trauma, grief.
Will appeal to: Those who enjoy a psychological twist on the stranded-cast-facing-a-nightmare scenario.

Blurb: Reckless, depressed, impulsive and sixteen, Harrow Lane is going to an island that shouldn’t exist to look for answers about the death of her father. Things immediately go very wrong and keep getting worse. With no way to reach the outside world and no understanding of the rules of the island, Harrow and her friends are in mortal danger. Matters are only complicated by Harrow’s emotions - she’s given her biggest feelings human faces and personalities and does her best to keep them locked away in a seedy motel she built in her mind. It’s creating sort of an “Inside Out in hell” situation as they fight for survival against a creature that seems to be made entirely of terror and who very well might spell the end of the world. (Amazon excerpt)

Review: First off...DISCLAIMER: I requested this title on Edelweiss. Thanks to Union Square & Co. for providing a temporary ecopy. This didn't influence my review in any way.

FRESH PERSPECTIVE

A group of teens (usually all girls, not in this case) stranded on an (often impossible) island that does its best to break their bodies and their sanity: a common enough scenario in YA horror. But Senf gives it a couple of spins that make Unnamed Bones stand out among the number of stories sharing the same premise. When this one starts, Harrow's father has been missing for a year after disappearing into a lake that shouldn't exist, at whose center, recently, an equally unexplainable island showed up. Feeling a sort of magnetic pull towards the island, Harrow decides to investigate its nature with three other teens - her former best friend Olive, the latter's sort-of boyfriend Ethan, and hiker/biker Shane - who are looking for an adventure. The author doesn't waste time unleashing horrors upon her characters (all while building a subtler sense of menace that comes from their having to figure out the rules of the place and its purpose), and though the worst ones may feel - or look - familiar at first, the ending will make you see them in a whole new light. Mind you - the journey to get there is a powerful one, marked by a string of experiences and findings on the characters' part more than by unexpected twists (though there are a handful of them, especially a shocking one that I didn't see coming). You might say the story resembles a videogame where the protagonist and her friends gather knowledge (and in a way, weapons - only not conventional ones) while progressing towards the ultimate big bad - a game that, for all its ordeals and nightmares, comes with a lot of heart, and delivers a bittersweet, yet somehow hopeful ending. [...]

Offbeat Offline: June 2026

Welcome to Offbeat Offline, where I bring you up-to-date with what went on in my life during the month just gone, give you a sneak peek of my next shenanigans, and share my favourite posts of late!

What happened last month to yours truly? The heat hit, I read a ton and...a new and improved health problem arose, because of course. As you may remember, I'm fond of saying that uneventful months are welcome in my household, because if something happens, it's always bad. And, oh, look! Surprise surprise. Anyhow, more about that later. Let's start with the bookish stuff as usual...

Offbeat Offline: May 2026 (Plus Introducing the Third Hiatus of the Year)

Welcome to Offbeat Offline, where I bring you up-to-date with what went on in my life during the month just gone, give you a sneak peek of my next shenanigans, and share my favourite posts of late!

What happened last month to yours truly? Same old same old but at least the perm took! Seriously, May was quite unremarkable, except for the perm thing. I finished my work on the spare room just in time for an early summer to arrive (...too bad I have to proceed to deep-clean the rest of the house now...I mean, the heat is still tolerable at this juncture, but give it a couple of weeks 😬...and anyhow, my calf muscles hurt and I'm feeling cranky ALREADY)...I made progress with my ARCs...oh, and I watched Good Omens 3 😄.

Tell Me Something Tuesday: Which Books Are You Looking Forward to Reading This Summer? (June-August)

Tell Me Something Tuesday is a weekly meme created by Heidi at Rainy Day Ramblings in order to discuss a wide range of topics from books to blogging (and some slightly more personal matters throw in for good measure). After Heidi stopped blogging (apparently for good), five of us took over as hosts while providing new questions. The current team is composed of Berls at Because Reading Is Better Than Real Life, Jen at That's What I'm Talking About, Karen at For What It's Worth, Linda at Book Girl of Mur-y-Castell and Roberta at Offbeat YA. This week's question is...

WHICH BOOKS ARE YOU LOOKING FORWARD TO READING THIS SUMMER? (JUNE-AUGUST)

I don't know if I'll ever get around to buying all these books or when, since 1) early reviews and excerpts might cause me to change my mind in the future; 2) given my current situation (see: unemployment status), book money is scarce; 3) the number of summer books that piqued my interest is staggering (SEVENTEEN!!!). On the other hand, as I'm posting this, I've had the chance to read six of these novels in ARC form, which is a respectable amount - more than one third of them. Also, there's one that I'm on the fence about already, and another one that I listed because I got the chance to do an authenticity read for it and I thought I'd give it a shoutout, but it's not really my scene. Anyhow, I wanted to give a bit of exposure to all the summer books that caught my eye, so here's my list (complete with pub dates)...

Melissa Albert: "The Bad Ones"

Title: The Bad Ones [on Amazon | on Goodreads]
Series: None
Author: Melissa Albert [Instagram | Goodreads]
Genres: Supernatural, Thriller/Mystery, Contemporary
Year: 2024
Age: 14+
Stars: 4.5/5
Pros: Engrossing, twisty mystery. Unexpected resolution. Fleshed-out leads whose relationship is equally well-developed.
Cons: A certain player's involvement becomes clear a bit too early. The supporting characters are little more than tools to advance the plot. The romance feels unnecessary.  
WARNING! Sexual assault/abuse (off-page), self-injury, car accident, parental death (off-page), murder by suffocation, near-drowning. Homophobia, bigotry, bullying.
Will appeal to: Those who like urban legends/supernatural mysteries/witchcraft gone wrong. Those who enjoy fierce, yet messy/toxic friendships.

Blurb: In the course of a single winter’s night, four people vanish without a trace across a small town. Nora’s estranged best friend, Becca, is one of the lost. As Nora tries to untangle the truth of Becca’s disappearance, she discovers a darkness in her town’s past, as well as a string of coded messages Becca left for her to unravel. These clues lead Nora to a piece of local lore: a legendary goddess of forgotten origins who played a role in Nora and Becca’s own childhood games... (Amazon)

Review: I'm late to the Melissa Albert party, but after loving her adult debut, I've made it my mission to read everything she writes. I have some small quibbles about The Bad Ones, but regardless, I found it to be trippy, entertaining and emotional, and I loved its curveball ending.
Just a heads-up before I start...the cover doesn't match the content. There's a weeping angel statue at some point in the story, but don't expect it to mean anything...and if the cover is supposed to represent the goddess (which of course it is), BIG FAIL.

DAZED AND AMAZED

The Bad Ones blends all-consuming (you might very well say toxic) friendship with a supernatural mystery that leaves you enough breadcrumbs to figure out its direction, yet throws you for a loop multiple times before you decipher it, and hits you with a last couple of twists you couldn't have seen coming. Told in three different voices and timelines (Nora's 1st person POV in the present, Becca's 3rd person POV in the past, another character's 3rd person POV recounting even older events), it's an addictive puzzle with minimal gore or violence, but a dark core - though it ultimately ends up in a much healthier place than one might expect. The beginning is atmospheric, intriguing, creepy - unexpected, too. Albert doesn't waste time setting up the mystery, but she doesn't start, as one would anticipate, by introducing her main characters - yet the hook is impossible to resist: three people, apparently unrelated, are accosted by a mysterious female being and vanish into thin air. From there, the wheels in the reader's head keep turning and the theories about what happened to those three (and to Becca herself, later reported missing as well) multiply. I buddy-read this one with my friend Carrie, and we traded a few wild hypotheses along the way, but most of them turned out to be wrong...though at least one of the answers had stared us in the face the whole time 😅. And, considering we're both seasoned supernatural-thriller readers, that's saying something. The final twist had me in awe, especially since it took one of my core assumptions about the plot and flipped it on its head, giving the story a far more original - and tragic - angle (Carrie was a bit less enthused by that turn of events, but I'll let her review speak for itself). [...]