Time jumps and narrative power in the opening of V.E. Schwab’s Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil

Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil is an ambitious novel with a complex structure: it follows three point-of-view characters across five hundred years. With that much ground to cover, V.E. Schwab doesn’t have time for her characters and their stories to come to life slowly, so she actively guides our attention. She uses her narrative camera in two ways: First, to zoom deep into a character’s point of view to show their character arc and engage readers in the plot. And second, to zoom out, guiding us through big time jumps and giving us glimpses of the future that entice us further into the story.

Schwab starts the novel by orienting us from a distant, zoomed-out perspective before dropping us into a scene. This orientation starts with the part heading: “María (d. 1532).” The tagline of the book declares it to be “a new genre-defying novel about immortality and hunger” and readers familiar with the genre and its tropes will guess right away that vampires might make an appearance. Thus, revealing a character’s date of death before we even meet her does not have the same effect here as it would in another genre, like literary fiction or romance, in which death is the ultimate end of the story. In a novel with immortal characters, a death date simply marks a major life transition.

The time stamp at the beginning of chapter one grounds us further, in a specific place and year: Santo Domingo de la Calzada, Spain, 1521.

Readers can do the quick math: We are about to meet a character a little more than a decade before her transition into death. That foreknowledge not only generates suspense—how will the transformation happen?—but also shapes how we read, as we’ll see in a moment.

The first line orients us further: “The widow arrives on a Wednesday.” This simple sentence punches above its weight for a few reasons: First, the word widow itself encompasses a transition, one defined by a movement from life to death. Knowing that immortality is going to be a theme of the novel, we are especially interested in that particular transition. Second, the verb arrives functions as both event and promise—it tells us something important is happening right now, while creating anticipation about what this arrival means for the story ahead. Finally, the word Wednesday introduces specificity, giving us an anchoring coordinate, while also contributing a nice moment of alliteration with the word widow.

You can use this tool for any novel that has a big canvas. Before you pull readers deep into a scene, hand them coordinates—a date, a place, a plot expectation—so they know where they stand.

Schwab immediately moves away from the widow’s arrival—further evidence that it was there to ground us and set an expectation. After this first sentence, Schwab zooms in deep and builds our sympathy for María by repeatedly showing us a character who knows who she is, living in a patriarchal world focused on what she is.

We meet María as she sits outside in the sun, waiting for her hair to dry. But within that seemingly static moment, we find out a lot about her. We hear that she was “born restless,” that she has neither patient hands nor a patient heart, and her hair is “an angry shade of red . . . the hot orange of an open flame. One she cannot seem to douse.” María is thirteen, nearing another transition—not into death this time, but into womanhood. And in this world, womanhood means marriage: Power over her must pass from the family of her birth to the family of her marriage.

María’s passionate personality makes us fear (or hope?) that this transfer of power won’t be easy. Schwab heightens that fear by showing us a brief conflict between María and her older brother Rafa. In the absence of their deceased father, Rafa expects María to obey him implicitly. But María, true to form, is not inclined to obey.

By contrast, the widow, whom María meets later in this scene, seems to see María for who she is—not just what she is. María freezes under her gaze, unused to being seen so clearly. The encounter promises the possibility of a different kind of story for María.

But first, she has to move through the story expected for her: marriage. In chapter two, we jump forward in time again, to 1529 when María is eighteen and on the cusp of that transition. Unlike her death date, María herself sees this transition coming: “She is many things—stubborn, cunning, selfish—but she has never been a fool. She knows that she was born into this body. She knows it comes with certain rules. The question has never been whether she would wed, but whom.”

María asserts her agency by deciding what she wants: “María has known, all her life, that she is not meant for common paths, for humble houses and modest men. If she must walk a woman’s road, then it will take her somewhere new.” Santo Domingo is on the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route, and María has taken to watching all of the pilgrims who come through town. She picks out Andrés de Guzmán, Viscount of Olivares, lures him into the church, and flirts with him.

It seems like a victory—the outcome María herself wanted. But very quickly we have a new question: Will María find herself outmatched by this new husband of hers? When María pretends for an instant that she plans to refuse his offer of marriage, her brother apologizes for her sense of humor, and the power seems to shift back to the viscount:

This power struggle is key to understanding how Schwab manages to walk a very tricky line with this character. María’s point of view dominates the first half of the novel, and Schwab needs us to care what happens to her, to root for her to win her struggle against a power structure that is stacked against her. At the same time, she needs to plant the seeds that make María’s later character arc seem believable. María is a flawed but compelling character, and even after these first two chapters, we want her to win the battles ahead of her. And Schwab has already promised us there will be battles ahead. The death date that oriented us on the very first page tells us that María’s story isn’t going to just end with a marriage, the way so many women’s stories do.

If you have a character in your own novel who will later cross a line, follow Schwab’s model. Name their flaws and show us the pressures that shape them, so we can understand their choices even if we can’t condone them.

Now let’s take a look at another kind of zooming-out move that Schwab uses twice in these opening chapters. At the end of chapter two, María has just married the viscount. She says her farewells to her family, then “takes her husband’s outstretched arm, and lets him lead her away, not knowing, of course—She will never see her family again.” It’s an ominous line that makes us remember that looming death date, now just three years away. Is death, in whatever form death takes for her, the reason María will never see her family again? The flash-forward (also known as prolepsis) stokes tension through dramatic irony but also reminds us to expect new twists for María’s story.

Schwab uses the same move earlier, at the end of chapter one. María crosses paths with the widow a second time, and this time she’s bold enough to approach. The widow, gathering a poisonous plant for a tonic, gives her two cryptic warnings that double as theme statements for the novel. “Nature gives us what we need,” and “In nature, beauty is a warning—the pretty ones are often poisonous.” It begins to rain, and the widow tells María to run home. The chapter closes on the flash-forward: “that night, señor Baltierra dies in his sleep. By dawn, the widow is gone. It will be ten years before María sees her again.” Ten years from 1521 places us in 1531—just before María’s 1532 death date—so we begin to suspect the mysterious widow is connected to whatever that death will be.

These glimpses of the future accomplish a few things: First, they make our narrator visible, reminding us that we have a well-informed guide through this complex story, one who knows how it all ends. Second, they stoke curiosity and give us something to speculate on—now we know that María will meet the widow again but not her family. With these two revelations, the narrator shares some of her power with the readers; now we too know something that the María of 1529 does not. In this way, Schwab transforms us from passive observers into active participants in María’s story—which is what her narrative camera was doing all along when it pulled back to give us those glimpses of the future.

Like Schwab’s orientation tool, you can use this flash-forward tool in any story that spans a lot of time or juggles many threads. (In my post on the opening of The God of the Woods, we saw Moore use it.) You should use it sparingly, however, because it momentarily pulls readers outside of the character’s deep POV. You also have to be careful not to reveal something that will eventually reduce tension rather than stoke it. For example, if the character who gets a future glimpse will be involved in a later scene with life-or-death stakes, you don’t want to undercut those stakes by casually revealing they are alive long after that scene.

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