The Bone Witch

The Bone Witch is a young adult fantasy novel by the American writer Rin Chupeco, published in February 2017 and the first of a trilogy.

The book alternates between Tea's account of her training and the reports of a bard who has come to hear the story of what she became, so the reader knows from the first pages that the arrangement of ashas, kingdoms and powerful families will end badly. The distance between the two timelines is the novel's structure, and it means that every kindness Tea is offered in the training house arrives with the reader's knowledge of how the story ends. Chupeco drew the magic from the mangkukulam of the Philippines, healers and witches who are feared by their communities and consulted by them anyway, and used the world of the geisha for the asha houses where Tea is trained in dance, music, politics and the raising of the dead. The world's history borrows as readily from Middle Eastern and Central Asian material, and the novel takes its time over the details of Tea's education before it allows the plot to arrive. It was followed by The Heart Forger in 2018 and The Shadowglass in 2019.