nicortizdesign

I loved Chime so much I do not have words. I stayed up late to finish it, and I re-read parts of it the next morning. Don’t let the cover fool you, it’s not a paranormal romance, nor is it about a goth girl playing Victorian dress-up…it simply does not do justice the sheer poetic loveliness of the novel. Chime feels like a retelling without being based on a fairytale: the whole timbre of the book is tale as old as time, but set in 1910s England. The closest comp titles I can think of are Juliet Marillier’s Wildwood Dancing, Laini Taylor’s Lips Touch Three Times and Elizabeth Bunce’s A Curse Dark As Gold. All of those books I love passionately, and I can happily add Chime to that list. Seventeen-year-old Briony Larkin has a secret and feels like she ought to be hanged. That secret might have something to do with her stepmother’s death and her sister’s childhood accident, or maybe the fact that she’s a witch. Life in her small town of Swampsea is dominated by forbidden visits to the swamp, known to be mystical and dangerous; that is, until Mr. Clayborne arrives to drain it in the name of progress. His son, Eldric, quickly strikes a friendship with Briony, bonding over incorrect Latin, a “Bad Boy” fraternity, and various other goofy antics. Not only do things begin to change, Briony’s murky memories are brought to the surface to be confronted by truth and perspective. At some point I will elaborate on the idea of book soulmates. Chime is mine—it feels like it was written just for me. My taste skews more towards fairy and folk tales, and I live for stories set on the cusp of the industrial age. The main character, usually female, must have agency. And the boy too, especially one who isn’t spineless and/or brooding, with a real personality. And writing, oh writing. It must be good writing, obviously—sometimes an unexpectedly funny turn of phrase, vivid imagery, an effortless smoothness that every writer knows only comes after countless revisions. In a writer not as skilled, Briony’s shattered confidence and self-image could easily come off as pitying and unbearable. I never get that feeling while reading in Billingsley’s beautiful prose; Briony is headstrong, protective, and often hilarious. Ultimately, Chime is a novel about the facets of a person, about self-loathing, about love, about art. About monsters, too, and the shape they come in—and about mothers and manipulation and morality. It has beautiful moments, moments where you stop breathing, moments where you sit back and gaze at the pretty words, moments where a sigh is practically written into the page.

2023-07-21 00:52