I feel bad giving this book 3 stars, as I really enjoyed The Girl from the Well and wanted to love this book based on its premise. But like so many other reviewers have said, The Bone Witch suffers from a pacing problem: namely that it is very slow and struggled to keep me engaged. 
 Chupeco is clearly a skilled author. Her sentences at times are beautiful, and the pictures she weaves are vivid, full of life (or death in certain instances). But the driving force of the book was learning about Tea's life and journey as an apprenticed Bone Witch into a very powerful but exiled Dark Asha, and that journey didn't keep my attention. I've struggled in the past with frame stories, feeling that often times that set up lessens tension of the stories the characters tell, and I encountered a similar problem here. When given two interwoven story threads, that of past Tea and current Tea, it was current, exiled and powerful, Tea's story that I wanted to hear. Whenever we jumped back to the POV of the bard who is hearing her story, I found myself excited and wanting to see more of this powerful woman misunderstood and exiled from her home. What instead I got was the slow and methodical journey of a fledgling bone witch who barely understands her powers having to train under tedious and repetitive circumstances, being tormented by nearly everyone around her. That story simply wasn't interesting to me. It's not that I need my character to be fully realized before the book even begins, but I don't think that Tea's history had a lot of engaging elements, and found the conflict she faces in the present day much more compelling. 
 And so I feel bad giving this book a 3, even when I was so disappointed by it. I wanted it to be more than it was, and glimmers of interesting things are there, just not fully explored. I respect Chupeco as an author and will probably check out whatever she writes next in hopes that it's a bit more engaging, but can't bring myself to give this more than a 3.