Nita’s mother captures and kills unnaturals – supernatural beings with special abilities or powers – and sells their parts, which can pass down powers of their own, on the black market. Nita doesn’t do the killing; her job is to dissect the bodies and prepare the parts for sale. She tells herself it’s OK because she’s not actually killing anyone. And the unnaturals her mother kills and sells are dangerous anyway. Mostly. It helps her feel less guilty about how much she enjoys dissecting these beings, which are mostly just humans with a few tweaks. But then her mother brings home a live unnatural, whom she plans to cut up while he’s still living, and Nita has to make a choice. The choice she makes has catastrophic consequences: she ends up sold on the black market, her own unnatural ability to heal herself revealed. And her captors plan to sell her off, piece by piece, to buyers who think eating bits of her will make them immortal.

When it comes to horror, I’m much more likely to read books for teens than adults. I’m a bit squeamish (no horror movies for me at all!), and I find that YA horror novels usually have the right amount of scares for me. Rebecca Schaeffer did her best to prove me wrong – Not Even Bones is pretty gruesome, and it doesn’t shy away from describing in detail how the parts for sale become detached from the body itself, and what people do with the parts once they buy them. It’s definitely on the edge of what I can handle. But it’s so well done, I enjoyed it a lot anyway. The book is essentially an escape plot, and it’s fast-paced and exciting, with twists I didn’t see coming. Schaeffer’s also a great world-builder. The market lives and breathes (often literally), bringing home the horror of the concept. She also does a good job of extrapolating her concept to the details: how attempts to protect unnaturals go awry and corruption sets in, how unnaturals use their abilities in creative ways large and small, the often ineffective and cruel ways unnaturals are used by others.

Nita is a great protagonist. She walks the line between hero and anti-hero, struggling with her own sense of morality. She must do things she never thought she would or could in order to escape, crossing several lines she had drawn for herself. Combine these actions with the opposing facts that Nita both enjoyed enabling her mother’s actions as well as freed her last victim, and readers will see that Nita is a complex and difficult character. Schaeffer introduces a sometimes-enemy, sometimes-ally of Nita’s in the character of Kovit, an unnatural called a zanny who must eat human pain to live. He has his own struggles with his morality that compare with Nita’s: he, too, enjoys his “work,” which in this case is torturing people. Zannies get intense pleasure from the kind of feeding they’re required to do. But he’s also capable of extreme acts of selflessness. Readers will find themselves questioning the degrees of moral difference between Nita and Kovit – and if there is any difference at all. This is a good pick for teens who don’t mind (or seek out!) some gore in their horror.