Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil Quiz
Test your knowledge of V. E. Schwab's sprawling 2025 vampire epic that spans five centuries and three unforgettable protagonists. This 20-question quiz covers the complete narrative arc—from 1521 Spain to 2019 Boston—with questions on plot, character motivation, themes, symbols, and synthesis. Mix of multiple-choice and short-answer formats. Find the full answer key with explanations after the questions.
Looking for more? Explore the complete book guide, browse frequently asked questions, or read our breakdown of the ending explained.
Questions
Plot and Sequence (Questions 1–8)
1. Multiple Choice
After ten-year-old María first encounters the veiled widow in Santo Domingo de la Calzada, how much time passes before she sees her again?
- A) Ten days
- B) Ten months
- C) Ten years
- D) Twenty years
2. Multiple Choice
What does María seek during her secret visit to the apothecary in León?
- A) A love potion for Andrés
- B) A tonic to prevent pregnancy
- C) Poison for the Countess
- D) A remedy for headaches
3. Multiple Choice
On the night of her transformation, what does María do after drinking from Sabine?
- A) Flees into the woods alone
- B) Drinks uncontrollably, killing Sabine, whose body crumbles to ash
- C) Collapses and wakes as a human
- D) Shares the blood with Andrés
4. Multiple Choice
How do Héctor and Renata die?
- A) Staked through the heart in their sleep
- B) Exposed to sunlight at dawn
- C) Burned alive in coffins by a village mob
- D) Drained of blood by a rival vampire
5. Multiple Choice
What is the outcome of Sabine's Carnevale hunting game in Venice?
- A) She spares Bianca out of pity
- B) Matteo forbids the kill at the last moment
- C) She kills Bianca on the final night of Carnevale
- D) Bianca escapes and reports Sabine to authorities
6. Multiple Choice
After Alice kills Colin and discovers she has no heartbeat, what does she do next?
- A) Returns to Scotland to find Catty
- B) Searches for Lottie in the school directory
- C) Calls her father to confess
- D) Visits a hospital for tests
7. Multiple Choice
What happens to Giada, Charlotte's lover in 1950s Rome?
- A) She becomes a vampire and leaves Charlotte
- B) Sabine snaps her neck at Charlotte's apartment threshold
- C) She dies peacefully of old age
- D) She moves to America to escape the danger
8. Short Answer
After leaving León as a newly turned vampire, Sabine shelters in a farmhouse. What are the two key rules of vampirism she learns during this encounter?
Character Motivation (Questions 9–13)
9. Multiple Choice
Why does Charlotte stay with Sabine for over a century despite witnessing her cruelty?
- A) Financial dependence on Sabine's wealth
- B) A binding promise made to Sabine that carries magical weight
- C) Fear of being hunted by other vampires
- D) She believes Sabine will eventually change
10. Multiple Choice
Why does Matteo turn Giovanni into a vampire?
- A) To build an army against a rival coven
- B) Out of grief after the mortal Alessandro's death
- C) As a trade to secure territory in Venice
- D) Because Giovanni begged for immortality
11. Multiple Choice
Why does Alice agree to help Lottie kill Sabine?
- A) She wants revenge for being murdered
- B) Lottie claims that because Alice is "newly made," killing her creator will restore her human life
- C) Ezra convinces her it is the moral path
- D) She wants to inherit Sabine's abilities
12. Short Answer
Why does Charlotte refuse to turn Giada into a vampire when Giada asks?
13. Short Answer
What motivates María to seek out the widow Sabine's apothecary on her first visit in León?
Themes and Symbols (Questions 14–17)
14. Multiple Choice
The epigraph describes burying bones in "midnight soil" from which a "feral rose" grows with "soft red petals hiding sharp white teeth." This image primarily symbolizes:
- A) The restorative power of nature
- B) Something beautiful that conceals lethal danger
- C) The inevitability of seasonal change
- D) Romantic love blooming from grief
15. Multiple Choice
Across the novel, what does the ruby necklace Andrés gives María come to represent?
- A) A protective talisman against sunlight
- B) Possession and the illusion of ownership
- C) A key that unlocks any threshold
- D) The eternal bond between maker and fledgling
16. Short Answer
What effect does grave dirt have on vampires, and how does Alice ultimately weaponize it?
17. Short Answer
Explain the thematic significance of "dead bodies make dead earth"—a warning Sabine gives Charlotte.
Synthesis (Questions 18–20)
18. Short Answer
Compare María's transformation into Sabine with Alice's transformation. How do the two differ in terms of agency and consent?
19. Multiple Choice
Which statement best synthesizes the novel's treatment of binding promises across all three timelines?
- A) Binding promises can be broken through sheer willpower
- B) They only affect mortals, not immortals
- C) They carry magical weight among vampires and can physically restrain those who make them
- D) They automatically dissolve when one party crosses an ocean
20. Short Answer
What single character connects all three protagonists—María/Sabine, Charlotte/Lottie, and Alice—across the centuries, and how?
Answer Key
Plot and Sequence
1. C) Ten years.
Chapter 1 closes with the note that ten years pass before María encounters the widow again. Their reunion occurs in León (Chapter 13), where María recognizes the ageless woman outside the apothecary.
2. B) A tonic to prevent pregnancy.
María dreads bearing Andrés's child. She remembers the widow once offered tonics to prevent or end pregnancy (Chapter 8). She slips out of bed, enters the kitchen, and bribes the cook to prepare a bitter herbal infusion.
3. B) Drinks uncontrollably, killing Sabine, whose body crumbles to ash.
In Chapter 17, Sabine bites María's throat, drains her blood, then offers her own. María drinks ravenously—unable to stop—and drains Sabine entirely. Her maker's body disintegrates to ash, and María rises healed, feeling only hunger.
4. C) Burned alive in coffins by a village mob.
Chapter 28 depicts the ambush: a mob chains Héctor and Renata, forces them into coffins, and burns them alive outside a church. A third coffin was prepared for Sabine, but a watching child silently warns her, and she escapes to a crypt.
5. C) She kills Bianca on the final night of Carnevale.
Matteo's challenge requires Sabine to stalk and seduce a single prey, delaying the kill until Lent. Over ten nights, she befriends Bianca, a young woman from Modena. On the final night of Carnevale, she leads a drunk Bianca into an alley and drinks deeply.
6. B) Searches for Lottie in the school directory.
After discovering she has no heartbeat, no breath, and produces bloody tears, Alice refuses to name what she has become and instead treats it as a logic problem. She finds Lottie's goodbye note and begins combing the school directory to locate her (Chapter 20).
7. B) Sabine snaps her neck at Charlotte's apartment threshold.
In Chapter 71, Sabine arrives at Charlotte's Rome apartment holding Giada hostage. Because of Charlotte's eighty-year-old vow not to harm Sabine, she is helpless. When Charlotte refuses to breach the sanctuary or issue an invitation, Sabine kills Giada and departs.
8. Answer: Sabine discovers that sunlight causes debilitating sickness and that vampires cannot enter a private home without an invitation from someone inside. At the farmhouse (Chapter 21), an invisible barrier stops her until she deceives the farmer's wife and gifts her ruby necklace to gain entry.
Character Motivation
9. B) A binding promise made to Sabine that carries magical weight.
In Chapter 61, after the horrific incident with the possessed Sabine, Charlotte makes a promise never to hurt her. Later, in Chapter 65, Charlotte kneels over the sleeping Sabine with a blade but cannot drive it into her chest—the promise physically restrains her hand an inch above the heart.
10. B) Out of grief after the mortal Alessandro's death.
Chapter 40 reveals that after Alessandro's death at fifty-nine, Matteo collapsed into months of paralyzing grief. He turned Giovanni out of that sorrow—a selfish mistake he later admits. Giovanni's recklessness escalates until a mortal mob catches and kills him.
11. B) Lottie claims that because Alice is "newly made," killing her creator will restore her human life.
In Chapter 79, Lottie proposes that Alice is still connected to Sabine through the creator-newborn blood bond. Killing Sabine, she argues, will sever that bond and restore Alice's humanity. Alice, desperate to reclaim her story, agrees.
12. Answer: Charlotte views immortality as a curse—a slow erosion of humanity that turns vampires into hollow predators. She loves Giada as she is and refuses to corrupt her or condemn her to the same monstrous existence she endures. Charlotte's experiences with Sabine have taught her that turning someone into a vampire is not a gift but a sentence.
13. Answer: María wants a tonic to prevent pregnancy. She dreads bearing a child by her husband Andrés, whose forced nightly visits cause her physical and emotional pain. She secretly pilfers coins from her mother-in-law to pay for the remedy, and Sabine indicates the tonic must be renewed every fortnight—providing a pretext for future visits.
Themes and Symbols
14. B) Something beautiful that conceals lethal danger.
The feral rose is the novel's central metaphor: beauty masking predation, softness hiding teeth. It describes the vampires themselves—alluring, captivating, and deadly—and foreshadows the duality that defines Sabine, Lottie, and eventually Alice.
15. B) Possession and the illusion of ownership.
Andrés presents the ruby necklace as a wedding gift, treating María as another acquisition. Later, Sabine gifts it to the farmer's wife to manipulate her way into a home. Across the narrative, the necklace marks the gulf between being given something and being owned by it.
16. Answer: Grave dirt saps a vampire's strength, causes sickness, and can drag them toward a true death—"death calls to death," as Renata warns. Alice weaponizes it by emptying her mother's grave-dirt pendant into a glass of blood. When Lottie drinks it, the grave dirt sickens and weakens her, allowing Alice to deliver the killing blow with a silver hairbrush.
17. Answer: Sabine's warning—"dead bodies make dead earth, and dead earth is dangerous"—reveals that where a corpse decays, the ground itself becomes toxic to vampires. It can weaken or trap them. This is why Sabine burns bodies after kills and why Alice collapses violently when she stumbles into a cemetery in Boston, the burial ground nearly dragging her down.
Synthesis
18. Answer: María actively chooses her transformation. She visits Sabine's apothecary at night and declares she wants freedom "by any means"—she consents to the bite and drinks willingly. Alice, by contrast, is killed without her knowledge or consent. Sabine murders her as collateral damage in a jealous dispute with Lottie, and Alice wakes to undeath confused, violated, and robbed of agency. The contrast underscores the novel's exploration of consent as the defining line between empowerment and violation.
19. C) They carry magical weight among vampires and can physically restrain those who make them.
Charlotte cannot drive a blade into Sabine's heart because she promised never to hurt her. Renata's binding promise traps Sabine for years. Jack's maker, William, bound him by promise to kill him when he ceased to be himself. Across all timelines, a vampire's word is not merely intention but a supernatural constraint.
20. Answer: Sabine (born María) is the connecting thread. Turned in 1531 Spain, she later becomes the maker of Charlotte Hastings in 1827 London—turning her after a season of seduction. In 2019 Boston, Sabine kills and turns Alice Moore as collateral in her centuries-long pursuit of Charlotte. All three women are bound by Sabine's hunger, her predatory love, and the cycle of violence she perpetuates across five hundred years.
Quiz covers the entirety of Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil (2025). All answers are traceable to the novel's outlined chapters.