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Rating: 
Summary: Please reissue this book!
Review: "Bone Dance" (along with "Falcon") has got to be one of my favorite all-time books. Emma Bull is an amazingly gifted storyteller with a sure, deft touch. If you haven't yet discovered her, you are in for a treat: complex characters, layered plots, detailed world-building, humor, and, above all, a compassionate yet clear-eyed understanding of human weakness make this an outstanding story, which, in my opinion, far exceeds "War for the Oaks" (perhaps her best-known work.) While "Oaks" is a delightful story, it is in "Bone Dance" that Bull really hits her stride. If you like Lois McMaster Bujold, Diana Wynne Jones, or Tanith Lee, then you will probably like Emma Bull too. This is a book that will haunt you long after you put it down.
Rating:
Summary: Bone Dance is phenomenally good.
Review: Bone Dance pulls the reader's emotions through a feather-&-broken-glass privet hedge.
While giving any apolcalypso dancer a well developed future history to consider, this book also creates several major and minor characters who are all believable. The villians, the "hero", the hero's best buddy, all jump to life within moments of appearing in the text. Bull's prose is crisp and clear, yet not sparse. There was no time while reading this novel that I couldn't have put together a setting for filming it. Wonderful dialog & brief, yet satisfying, philosophy/description passages combine to make this one of the better SF/Fantasy books I have ever read. I've gone through it four or five times so far, and I'm still finding new & cool details that I missed in the previous readings.
Rating: 
Summary: Smug and Superficial
Review: Emma Bull's writing really sets my teeth on edge. Her fantasies are generally full of "Book Larnin'" yet give no experiential sense of the characters or the issues. _Bone Dance_, a story of an obnoxious amnesiac girl who has strange connections to the world of technology, is no exception. I was particularly nauseated by the hollow and meaningless descriptions of Tarot, which sounded as if they had been pulled verbatim from the little booklet that comes with a Tarot deck, and of Voudoun, which could have come directly from some Llewellyn beginner's guide. It was as offensive to me as it would be to a person from a Native culture to have some entitled white outsider co-opt an important ritual without studying or asking permission.I can't express how much I hated this novel. The characters were flat, the situations were flat, the whole thing was inexcusably superficial, smug and derivative. It called attention to itself like a toddler saying "Look at me!" If you want to read something good on a similar theme, try William Gibson's "Neuromancer" series, or Tad Williams' "Otherland."
Rating:
Summary: Not As Good as _War for the Oaks_ but Still Brilliant!
Review: Like most of Emma Bull's work, _Bone Dance_ is better than 98% of everything that's on the fantasy shelves today. I didn't find it as fabulously built as _War for the Oaks_, but it was still a marvelous read. Bull takes a common theme (life after nuclear war and the breakdown of civilisation-as-we-know-it), and turns it sideways . To begin with, it takes place in a city, not the usual post-nuclear desert; for another, not everybody has turned into punk-rockers/bikers. Instead the city has become a multi-cultural meeting ground, with a government whose power seems to be based on control of energy and communications resources and an economy large enough to support an entertainment business and a trade in luxury goods (such as pre-war compact disks and videotapes). Add in a likeable protagonist, a lot of voudou, and a former member of the psychic clique responsible for the war, now on a mission of penance (she's spent the past few decades killing off her former colleagues), and we have a plot that more than fits the fascinating milieu. Best of all, Bull had abandoned the tired old USA-USSR backstory for her post-nuclear world; instead there was apparently a war between North and South America Particularly interesting is the fact that--judging from the heavy Hispanic and Afro-French influence in the un-named City--the two were apparently rather similar to each other by the time they came to blows.
Rating:
Summary: Not As Good as _War for the Oaks_ but Still Brilliant!
Review: Like most of Emma Bull's work, _Bone Dance_ is better than 98% of everything that's on the fantasy shelves today. I didn't find it as fabulously built as _War for the Oaks_, but it was still a marvelous read. Bull takes a common theme (life after nuclear war and the breakdown of civilisation-as-we-know-it), and turns it sideways . To begin with, it takes place in a city, not the usual post-nuclear desert; for another, not everybody has turned into punk-rockers/bikers. Instead the city has become a multi-cultural meeting ground, with a government whose power seems to be based on control of energy and communications resources and an economy large enough to support an entertainment business and a trade in luxury goods (such as pre-war compact disks and videotapes). Add in a likeable protagonist, a lot of voudou, and a former member of the psychic clique responsible for the war, now on a mission of penance (she's spent the past few decades killing off her former colleagues), and we have a plot that more than fits the fascinating milieu. Best of all, Bull had abandoned the tired old USA-USSR backstory for her post-nuclear world; instead there was apparently a war between North and South America Particularly interesting is the fact that--judging from the heavy Hispanic and Afro-French influence in the un-named City--the two were apparently rather similar to each other by the time they came to blows.
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Summary: interesting and enjoyable
Review: Theres a secret in this book and none of us who've read it can tell you, but once you read it and find out the whole book changes. Emma Bull is a wonderful writer, period, but this book is amazing. This book is sci-fi-ish, reminds me a little of cyberpunk (the setting), and she also manages to throw in Voodoo. It all works wonderfully. Go forth and READ!
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Summary: Incredible
Review: This book is great. A unique premise, characters you really care about, and a great story. Plenty to like, and it manages to be mystical without being fluffy. I'd say more, but if I do I'll give a way the story -- go into this with a blank slate for best effect. Damn shame it's out of print as of this writing -- this book deserves a lot better.
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Summary: A shame this is out of print
Review: This one's even better than Falcon, though I gave them both a rating of 9. Here Bull uses the first person narrative to spring a surprise on us -- the protagonist has a secret that's never mentioned but is perfectly obvious in retrospect, and that's all I'm going to say. We've seen the post-apocalypse setting before, but Bull makes it fresh again by bringing in references to voodoo. The lull after the first climax is the only thing that keeps this book from earning a score of a perfect 10 (and even the "slow part" has lots of interesting stuff going on, just not at the breathless pace that preceded it). GREAT read
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