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    Kingdom of Needle and Bone
    Kingdom of Needle and Bone
    Kingdom of Needle and Bone
    Audiobook3 hours

    Kingdom of Needle and Bone

    Written by Mira Grant

    Narrated by Cris Dukehart

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Modern medicine has conquered or contained many of the diseases that used to carry children away before their time, reducing mortality and improving health. Vaccination and treatment are widely available, not held in reserve for the chosen few. There are still monsters left to fight, but the old ones, the simple ones, trouble us no more.

    Or so we thought. For with the reduction in danger comes the erosion of memory, as pandemics fade from memory into story into fairy tale. Those old diseases can't have been so bad, people say, or we wouldn't be here to talk about them. They don't matter. They're never coming back.

    It begins with a fever. By the time the spots appear, it's too late: Morris's disease is loose on the world, and the bodies of the dead begin to pile high in the streets. When its terrible side consequences for the survivors become clear, something must be done, or the dying will never stop. For Dr. Isabella Gauley, whose niece was the first confirmed victim, the route forward is neither clear nor strictly ethical, but it may be the only way to save a world already in crisis. It may be the only way to atone for her part in everything that's happened. She will never be forgiven, not by herself, and not by anyone else. But she can, perhaps, do the right thing.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateApr 30, 2019
    ISBN9781541449671
    Kingdom of Needle and Bone
    Author

    Mira Grant

    Mira Grant is the author of the New York Times best-selling Newsflesh trilogy, along with multiple other works of biomedical science fiction. She has been nominated for the Hugo Award, and her book, Feed, was chosen as one of NPR's 100 Killer Thrillers.

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    Reviews for Kingdom of Needle and Bone

    4/5

    183 ratings11 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Uncanny to read in a world after COVID outbreak due to its comments on anti vaxxine movements and bodily automony. But because of this being the reality now, it wasn't quite as dystopian as it maybe intended to be.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      This is good but I wanted it to be more. I can appreciate the topic and the story, especially in 2020 pandemic (kinda freaky thinking about it), but wish there was more on what happened from the theme park to the island. I hope this gets more story added and becomes a series somehow.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Story (4/5): The story is mainly about Dr. Isabella Gauley and her action to form a community secluded from the rest of the world in the midst of a pandemic that annihilates people’s immune systems. This was well written and eerie to read given that it was written before the COVID pandemic. Some things in here are strangely similar to what we are going through now. However, given what we have been going through there were some things in the book that were also strangely overlooked ...however...hindsight is 20/20 and all that (pun intended). I think my biggest complaint is the end of the book, I saw the huge twist coming and thought it was fairly predictable. My issue with this twist (aside from the predictability) is that I don't think our main protagonist's motivations were well explained and they just didn't quite make sense. Characters (4/5): Dr. Isabella is a character that is interesting and complex. She is the primary character in the book; although we do get to spend a bit of time with Patent Zero’s mother as well. You can tell Isabella isn’t afraid to venture into grey areas right from the beginning, while I never really engaged with her character she was interesting enough and had some intriguing complexity to her.Setting (4/5): This book is set in the near future. A lot of the book takes place in Dr. Gauley’s clinic and in the sanctuary she sets up. It’s a world that is eerily similar to our own in this COVID-19 pandemic (there is a mention of distance learning for kids, etc). Although I couldn’t help thinking “why aren’t people social distancing!!!” and “where are their masks!!” throughout. While it is not an incredibly novel setting it is an intriguing imagination of what things could be like if this happened, and the situations are different enough from our current pandemic to be intriguing.Writing Style (4/5): This book is well written and easy to read. I whipped through it quickly and never got bored. I do think it was a bit predictable and thought there were some major holes in how this pandemic was dealt with. However, that may be my current more pandemic-saavy self speaking rather than my past more pandemic-innocent self.My Summary (4/5): Overall I enjoyed this and am kind of glad I read it, I think I would have enjoyed it more if I hadn't read it in the middle of a pandemic. The twist at the end was a bit out of left field and despite that still kind of predictable. If you are looking for a fun, short, pandemic thriller with a twist at the end I would recommend. If you’ve had enough of pandemics to last a lifetime I might skip this.
    • 3/5
      I like it, and I want to say I like it more, but the ending seemed a little sudden and I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be feeling about it?
    • 5/5
      This was a quick read and I loved that I did not see the ending coming and that it still leaves the ending open to interpretation.
    • 4/5
      This is a anti vax medical horror novella. Mira Grant does great stories that use science as a jumping off point. In this book a new deadly version of measles breaks out and it pits people against one another bout vaccinations. The new version is a mutation that is fairly deadly, and people are very worried. No one is claiming responsibility for it and six months later a deadly version of whooping cough races around the world. The family of the first victim is the focus of the story and the family is split between pro and anti-vaccination. On the pro side is a doctor and a pharmacist, the anti-side is the bio mother who gave up her child to allow her pharmacist sister to raise her as her own. Dr Isabella Gauley gets word from pharmacist friends of Brooke in Canada that the people that survive exposure have a mutated immune system that will no longer allow current vaccinations to work. She decides to take matters in her own hands and reach out to people that can help her keep a segment of the population clean from the disease as the CDC and others work on a cure.

      Digital review copy provided by the publisher through NetGalley

    • 4/5
      Kingdom of Needle and Boneby Mira Grant(Seanan McGuire)2018Subterranean Books4.0 / 5.0A horror story and a studied critique of the anti-vaccine movement and possible dark and horrific results, when some refuse to take responsibility for themselves, and the greater good of a community. It's amazing how quickly a disease can reach and become an epidemic. Grant weaves the plausible medical epidemic, started by a few, into a terrifying horror that could reach worldwide.Lisa, an 8 year old is enjoying a family vacation in Florida when she begins to feel I'll. She doesnt went to miss out on the rest of the vacation, or ruin it for her family, so says nothing. She feels worse and worse. By the time she is on the plane, heading home, that she becomes obviously ill and is unable to walk. Immediately taken to an emergency room, she is diagnosed with Morris's Disease. It is highly contagious, and communicable, so everyone she has had contact with is at risk. Hotel workers. Everyone on the plane, or at the airport....Lisa does not survive. 30 million become sick. 10 million die worldwide from a preventable disease.Dr. Izzy works with communicable diseases and knows it's impossible to prevent disease when there are those that refuse to be vaccinated for religious or other reasons, so she finds an island that she develops as a safe shelter, only those vaccinated can inhabit the island. Herd immunity is discussed.This was so interesting to read, and is so plausible....I loved the premise and it definitely made me reconsider my stance on anti vaccine. I can now see the horrible ramifications because of the ignorance of the few.Important. Recommended.
    • 5/5
      An interesting take on the vaccine/no vaccines debate. What happens when compromised herd immunity opens the door to a new form of measles that has devastating effects on the survivors? Those who are unaffected try desperately to remain quarantined. I don't want to give too much away, but it is so easy to see how some of the uglier behavior in this book could happen. I love Mira Grant (Seanan McGuire) and the attention to detail she gives to the science in her horror stories. A great way to start to 2019!
    • 3/5
      I suspect this will prove to be a marmite of a book: people will love it or hate it. I definitely don't hate it, but I'm not quite sure I love it either.This is not the fault of the author. This book is typical Mira Grant--well researched, thought out, and written. The POV here is omniscient, an unusual choice for this kind of book (previous Grant books have been first- or tight third-person narratives), but the reason why becomes apparent at the end. What's also apparent from the get-go is the author's dislike (to put it mildly) of the anti-vaxx crowd, and the reader soon realizes this is a thought experiment of what could happen if they get their way.To go along with this, there are a lot of medical ethics conundrums in this book. In particular, the bodily autonomy argument as used by anti-vaxxers (co-opted from the anti-choice movement) is one I've never thought of before. (Is this argument a thing in the real world?) This becomes the central theme of the book, and is what leads our protagonist--more of an anti-hero, in this case--to do what she does. This is made clear in the creepy, abrupt ending, which reverses everything the reader has previously comprehended about Dr. Isabella Gauley and her story. The ending is not pleasant, but it has stuck in my mind for days.I think this story is crying out for a full novel. I hope the response to this novella is such that Mira Grant decides to write it.
    • 4/5
      3.5/5 stars.

      This isn't the story of the virologists searching for a cure as their time runs out. This isn't the story of a brave hero in a post-apocalyptic society. This is the story of one very flawed woman and the things she'll do--good and bad--to help save part of humanity, and it's also the story of three sisters and their family.

      Morris’s disease is a variant of the measles and it kills 1 out of every 3 it strikes, including pediatrician Dr. Isabella Gauley's niece Lisa Morris. When Isabella's mother Brooke brings an important discovery about Morris's to Isabella they hatch a plan to isolate and protect people haven't been exposed to Morris's and also those who can't be vaccinated. They keep this plan secret from their activist sister Angela who campaigns for mandatory vaccinations, a campaign that's been twisted to anti-abortion lobbyists to dispense with legal notions of bodily autonomy.

      1/2 star off my rating because this novella had a lot going on and not enough space to show it all. There are moments, especially near the end, when I would have felt far more strongly about events if I knew these characters better. I really liked the details, especially what I mentioned above about the political landscape post-Morris's, but I didn't have enough time to enjoy them.
    • 2/5
      Short enough that it doesn’t have the problem with repeated phrases that has started to bother me in Grant’s writing, but characteristically uses quotes from in-universe documents to introduce everything in rather heavy-handed ways. This is consistent with the heavy-handed nature of the story itself, which is about an outbreak of a variant of measles that doesn’t just wipe your immune system (did you know that catching regular measles often also removes prior immunities to other diseases? That’s some freaky shit) but prevents it from learning new immunities in the future—meaning that a huge percentage of the world is permanently immunocompromised. Vaccinate your kids (and get your flu shot), people, but this story is skippable except for hardcore Grant fans.