A triumph of LLM literalism. It 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. The humans actually defeat the bone people by kicking one of them in the head (er, skull) and then 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!

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.