As a former high school English teacher, I have a place for fall in my chronologically set mind for the fall tying back to the early colonial days in America. Salem’s witch trials always made students pause as they learned how hard life was and how “wicked” people could be. In To the Bone, Ellis is hopeful of a new life in America, where she’ll work for a family for a time and be able to live freely in the new lands. But James Fort is much rougher than she imagined. In the spring and summer, Ellis consoles herself by taking care of the babe in the family she works for as well as finding a small queer romance, supremely forbidden in Colonial America. However, as the food rations dwindle and crops wither for lack of irrigation, Master and Mistress Collins both behave in selfish, survival-of-the-fittest ways that make this dark historical fiction surprising. Everyone will want Ellis to make it through the winter, and she has the inner drive to do it, including living in conditions no one would dream of today. Based on true events, readers will be reminded that early American settlers endured much, and our Indigenous custodians of the land had every right to be skeptical of their reason to want to stay. Still, as Ellis’s journey becomes more and more treacherous, readers become further sucked in and become chilled to the bone.