Published: March 17th, 2011; Dial
361 pages
From Goodreads:
Before Briony's stepmother died, she made sure Briony blamed herself for all the family's hardships. Now Briony has worn her guilt for so long it's become a second skin. She often escapes to the swamp, where she tells stories to the Old Ones, the spirits who haunt the marshes. But only witches can see the Old Ones, and in her village, witches are sentenced to death. Briony lives in fear her secret will be found out, even as she believes she deserves the worst kind of punishment.
Then Eldric comes along with his golden lion eyes and mane of tawny hair. He's as natural as the sun, and treats her as if she's extraordinary. And everything starts to change. As many secrets as Briony has been holding, there are secrets even she doesn't know.
My Rating:
2 stars
My Thoughts:
To some, Chime might be the perfect gothic masterpiece. To
me, it was confusing, childish, and an overall struggle to finish. The first
chapter started off well enough, with Briony telling a judge that she was a
witch, and she deserved to die. It was a good hook, but the story went downhill
from there.
I was confused from the start by the vague setting of the
story (a swamp in England called the swampsea. Where?). And Briony’s inner
monologue didn’t help either; she spent so much of the book talking about how
horrible of a person she was, that there wasn’t much story there other than
that. And Billingsley’s writing style left me with no idea what the setting or
the characters looked like. I had to re-read entire sections because of their
strange wording, which made me fall out of the story, and made the book an
ordeal to finish.
The plot wasn’t confusing, but that was only because it was
so simple that I could tell what was going to happen at the end of the book. I
didn’t feel like I could relate to anything that was happening because it all
seemed so made up.
And the relationship between Eldric and Briony was barely
even there. When Briony and Eldric spent time together, it was in their
“bad-boy club” which involved Eldric teaching Briony to box, and the two of
them speaking in their own made-up version of Latin. And every description of
Eldric from Briony’s point of view described him as a lion. I couldn’t see him
as a good hero because I kept picturing a man with whiskers and cat ears. And then Briony would go on about how she
was lusting for him, for no reason. To put it in short terms; they had zero
chemistry.
This absence of chemistry seemed to be because Briony (and
the story in general) was so childish. Sure, Briony made a few clever
witticisms, but her behavior made her seem like she was ten, not eighteen. And
the names she had for the “old ones” sounded like they had been pulled out of a
children’s story (take “mucky face” for example). I felt like I was reading a
children’s book.
The only thing that keeps me from giving this book one star
(I know I haven’t said anything good about it) is that Billingsley’s writing
style wasn’t bad in a seemed-like-a-first-grader-wrote-it kind of way. Her
writing was detailed and even fancy, but in such a way that it seemed overdone.
If the author had spent more time developing her plot and characters (instead
of using fancy words and creating pretty sentences) I might have liked this
book.
I feel kind of bad about giving Chime such a low rating, but
I just couldn’t make myself enjoy reading it, no matter how hard I tried.
Certain passages were kind of poetic, but that didn’t make up for the bad plot
and flat characters. I liked Rose at certain points, but that was it.
Billingsley’s writing style might be an acquired taste, but it’s definitely not
for me. Unless you like vague stories with little to no romance, I wouldn’t
recommend reading this book.
