The three Bone cousins Fone Bone (renamed Hero Bone in my head), Smiley Bone (Comic Relief Bone) and Phoney Bone (Greedy, or frequently Insufferable, Bone) have been driven out of their home town of Boneville because Phoney Bone had some sort of get rich quick scheme and scammed the entire town, and now an angry mob has driven them off. They are wandering in the wilderness when they are attacked by a huge swarm of locusts and end up in a mysterious forest in a valley, separated for quite some time.
Fone Bone befriends a small leaf-like bug called Ted and meets a large red dragon, before he is introduced to a pretty girl, Thorn, and her grandma Rose. He also encounters furry, sharp-toothed, pointy-eared rat creatures, who would very much like to eat him. He is eventually re-united with his cousins, who are working in the local tavern at Barrelhaven. As Phoney tries to make himself rich by fixing the betting for the annual cow race, Thorn keeps having strange dreams about her past. It also seems like there are strange and sinister things afoot with the rat creatures, their leader Kingdok, and a mysterious hooded individual, all looking for the Phoney Bone, who wears a star on his shirt.
As Thorn is alerted to the fact that dragons are in fact real, her dreams start coming all the more frequently, and she remembers more about her past, before she ended up in the remote valley with her grandma. She discovers that her grandmother has been lying to her all her life and that there is a reason the rat creatures and the Hooded One are after both Phoney Bone and her for a reason. Can Fone Bone and his cousins help Thorn achieve her destiny? Can they stop the sinister Lord of the Locusts from rising and destroying the world? Will Phoney ever stop trying super annoying Get Rich Quick schemes and making himself unpopular with everyone around him?
I bought my mammoth collected edition of Bone so many years ago I don’t even remember not owning it. Have I ever read it before now? That would be a resounding no. So what did I think, once I finally read it?
Yay Malin!
I love this book, and was going to give it a re-read this year.