A triumph of LLM literalism. It may never have occurred to me that that might literally have been the title. Googling "bone people" or "bone people children's book" doesn't work; the SERPs are flooded by a different novel that won the Booker in 1986, interesting zero six-year-olds. But "bone people science fiction" does work!
I read (er, reread) it last night using the book-borrowing feature of archive.org which got them existentially sued: https://archive.org/details/bonepeople0000unse/. The mind-reading business hardly figures in the action; it's there, but marginal. Actually the humans defeat the bone people by kicking one of them in the head (er, skull) and then by blasting them with an air gun. Literally an air gun: it shoots air, and it turns out that air kills bone people. That was lucky!
Upon second reading I remain of the opinion that defeating mind-readers by keeping one's thoughts in the back of one's mind is the most interesting thing about the book, so it's not surprising that was what stuck in my mind, though not so much in the back. It's been in a trunk in the middle somewhere.
For anybody else playing the home game like I am, this is an easier read than Bruno Schulz "Street Of Crocodiles".
Later
No, that's not quite fair; you get halfway into this and it starts to be written like the Hadiths. "The Bone People do not think about a thing but what it is an evil thought." I'm always saying!
I also found it strangely written and hard to read (as an adult). At the very end, on p. 72, there is a sort of appendix for teachers which says:
The total vocabulary of this book is 280 words, excluding proper names
and sound words. The 15 words in roman type should be familiar to
children reading on a third-grade level. The 20 words above third-grade
level are shown in italic type.
280 words seems rather few! That's probably why it reads like Gertrude Stein.
