skygiants

Franny Billingsley's Chime has a lot in common with The Folk Keeper, the first Billingsley book I read -- it's a dark fairy tale centered around a teenaged girl who has a potentially-sinister connection with inhuman spirits, in the kind of universe where everything has a price. (Sometimes, you pay the price twice.) But within these parameters they are very different and equally excellent books, so the fact that there are two of them is like getting pumpkin pie and apple pie -- they're both pie, but they're very different kinds of pie, and they're both delicious, so why would anyone be unhappy about this?

The main difference, I think, is that The Folk Keeper's Corinna is fiercely independent -- she doesn't like people, she's not tied up with anybody else. Chime's Briony, on the other hand . . . also doesn't like people much, but she's completely, inextricably tied up in her family. Briony has a twin sister named Rose who is "peculiar," whom she loves and resents, for whose life she feels responsible; she has a stepmother, who encouraged her writing, whom she loved, for whose death she feels responsible; she has a father, who has been incredibly distant from the family for years, who apparently is now all of a sudden trying to act responsible for her; and according to Briony, everything bad that has ever happened to her family is her fault, which is why she starts out the book asking to be hanged.

Then you have Eldric, the love interest, who has just come from university in the city where they are beginning to have automobiles and electricity instead of witch trials and swamp spirits. Eldric is hilarious to me because he is one of those love interests who appears to have wandered in from a different book entirely and does not really understand that he is now in a dark fairy tale and his love interest fully believes that she is a being of pure evil.

BRIONY: So here we are in the library that I burned down, destroying every story I ever wrote, after almost killing my stepmother. Let's talk about you!
ELDRIC: I'm a well-known bad boy. I threw a stone and broke a window once!
BRIONY: . . .
ELDRIC: I'll teach you how to be wicked, Briony. Let's sneak out in the middle of the night and practice boxing!
BRIONY: . . . oh, you're sweet.

Then they attempt to flirt in Latin, except Eldric doesn't know it very well (though Briony does) so they flirt in terrible fake Latin, which cracked me up maybe more than it had a right to. I am saying this so you understand that there are some bits that are really funny in the middle of what the rest of the book is about, which is an examination of guilt, and emotional abuse, and how hard it is to break out of destructive ways of thinking about yourself -- how hard it is for someone who has been trained to see themselves a certain way to believe anything else.

Other virtues of the book: a.) Briony has an incredibly rich, witty, unique and incredibly unreliable first-person voice that I loved (although some people might bounce off it, I don't know) and b.) the treatment of Rose, Briony's twin sister. Rose starts out the book looking like a stock character, Briony's childlike burden, but as the story goes on Billingsley emphasizes more and more that Rose is not just a person in her own right, but an intelligent and creative one whose brain happens to work in a different pattern. Briony saves Rose once or twice, but Rose also saves Briony, and that made me really happy.

(I should, however, warn for a scene of attempted sexual assault, which I wish hadn't been in there -- I don't think it was necessary.)