Outside the Bones

Wow! Was my first reaction as I finished reading Outside the Bones by Lyn Di Iorio. From the cover one would probably think that it’s a scary story, but its actually not. It was interesting, sad and even funny at times. This is not your ordinary “I’m reading this book for class,” type of book. It was a very easy read, so easy that I read the entire thing in 2 days. It was engaging and I found myself wanting to keep reading to see what was going to happen.

Although this book is fiction, some of the context in it is actually real. Being from Hispanic background I am familiar with “palo,” “botanicas” and the idea of “Nkisis.” In the book Fina sacrifices a rooster, which directly reminded me of a movie in which one of the characters also sacrifices a rooster by cracking its neck. Someone who is not familiar with “santeria” might find some of the things in this book quite shocking. Santeria and brujeria have always been a topic of my interest which is yet another reason why I liked this book.

            “To somebody else, he would be just another light-brown man with raisin-clumped hair already starting to gray in the sideburns.” This is the first description that we get of Chico, and from this first page I already feel like I know what he looks like. “That thick hair of an animal. Her skin was like coffee, with a lot of milk in it.” This was one of those strong descriptions in where you can imagine exactly what her skin color looks like. Di Iorio does this with all of the characters that she introduces and because of that the reader is able to paint a picture of what these characters look like.

Another thing that I found interesting was that all of the characters had significance in the story line. All of them where in the book for a purpose and we see that as the story progresses. The only character who didn’t really have significance was Gus, Fina’s ex husband in the beginning of the book because we never hear of him again.

Foreshadowing is literary device also used in this book. One example of this is when Isis says “Callate ya, callate ya,” to the dog as she as she is walking through the park. We see her say this again when she is telling the story of when Aurora was killed and she was telling Aurora the same thing.