Every Bone a Prayer by Ashley Blooms

Abstract

Reviewed by: Every Bone a Prayer by Ashley Blooms Hannah D. Markley (bio) Ashley Blooms. Every Bone a Prayer. Naperville, Ill.: Sourcebooks Landmark, 2020. 352 pages. Softcover. $16.99. “Dear Reader,” Ashley Blooms writes in a preface to her debut novel, “I wrote this book because I wanted (and needed) to explore the ways that trauma impacts individual, familial, and community identity…[and] how we find a way back to each other and to ourselves.” Her letter makes a promise for Every Bone a Prayer: that the book will be a prescient exploration for this time when societal and individual trauma have dominated conversations and many lives. From the first page, Blooms establishes herself as a thoughtful and careful detailer of the traumatic content. She says, dear reader, the story ahead will be difficult. Yet with a clear, forward communication of its heavy content, she ensures the characters and the reader are not alone in the trauma, that she herself can be trusted through whatever comes and however it ends. True to her word, the reader feels the bodily and generational trauma in the descriptions and through the perspective and imagination of the central character. Misty is introduced as a child living with her father, mother, and sister, but quickly the reader sees the tension in the marriage and simultaneously, with Misty and her older sister, Penny. As Misty and Penny tussle on one side of the trailer, her parents throw verbal jabs on the other. She feels the discord between [End Page 101] her parents, hears ominous proclamations from her father and watches him leave. After the opening scene of conflict, a tearful Misty scrambles down to the creek near the house. There she comes alive—or rather, everything else comes alive around her. Misty describes her mother teaching her how to pray: “Now open up your heart. It’s more listening than saying anything, but you can ask for things, too. You open up and wait for God to speak to you”…[Misty] listened for God—her chest a door flung wide open; her heart the golden light spilling onto the floor, eating the darkness whole. She invited everything inside. Instead of prayer becoming a way to talk to God, learning to pray catapults Misty into a mystical journey of opening herself to the world. Nature becomes her confidante and teacher. Blooms lyrically describes Misty’s connection to the animals, trees, creek, and even to her family’s trailer, but it is the crawdads that become Misty’s particular friends. As she listens to the nonhuman world, Misty learns that everything has a name, and those names communicate the essence of each being, human or nonhuman. The prose pulls the reader into Misty’s connection to the world through vividly captured textures and sounds, most often through the lens of her body. In a scene describing a forest, Blooms writes, “The trees filled Misty to the brim with wonder and a sense of unquestioned belonging. A rootedness so deep that she was surprised to find her legs could bend when she opened her eyes.” The world-building in the novel seems rushed. Misty’s connection to nature is evident from the first few pages, but her communications with the crawdads and other nonhuman [End Page 102] beings lapses into descriptive paragraphs detailing feelings and experiences rather than launching the reader into a vivid scene where, as the observer, one can enter into the communication, not just feel a vague sense of connection. The reader’s distance from Misty’s perspective is exacerbated by general descriptions of the natural world and animals. This trend is also true of characters. For example, William, a neighbor, is introduced early in the novel and briefly described as a peer and a best friend-type to Misty. Their interactions move quickly into a more complicated relationship without bolstering up the initial claim of friendship. In the beginning, in particular, his character appears flat compared to Misty. Overall, the scenes and characters are not always as alive or textured in the ways Misty seemed to be living them. However, the scenes and characters do gather depth as the narrative develops. What Blooms does with...