Chime, by Franny Billingsley

I bought Chime on the strength of Franny Billingsley's The Folk Keeper, and it didn't disappoint. Chime is gorgeous, lush, creepy, luminous, romantic, terrifying and heartbreaking. Briony, Rose, and Eldric: how could you not want to read their story? (Assuming it's not all fairyland and elves, which it isn't. At all.) Here's the first two lines:

       I've confessed to everything and I'd like to be hanged.

       Now, if you please.

I don't need to say anything else: you must want to read it now. Especially with that cover. And the amazing font in the chapter titles.


Okay, I'll tell you a little more about it. Take equal parts Brothers Grimm (NOT the expurgated versions) and Bronte sisters (mostly Jane Eyre). Throw in a healthy dollop of campfire horror tales. Then wrap in silk and ribbons and take it "into the wild, into the real, into the ooze and muck and the clean, muddy smell of life." Past the Flats, through the Quicks, across the snickleways of the Slough. Hide it in "a tangle of mist and midst" in the middle of the swamp, and then come back and ask, "A person must always keep a secret, mustn't she?"

Oh, and it's a love story.

Briony narrates, Briony who hates herself. Briony who says she deserves to be hanged. Briony who takes care of her twin sister Rose, because Rose can never be left alone, and now that Stepmother is dead there is only Briony, because Father is never home.

Father's silence is not merely the absence of sound. It's a creature with a life of its own. It chokes you. It pinches you small as a grain of rice. it twists in your gut like a worm.

Silence clawed at my throat. It left a taste of burnt matches.

No, our family doesn't talk much. 

The narration is oblique and halting, because Briony's understanding of herself is oblique and halting. Her memories of what happened to Stepmother and to Rose don't match up, but she is certain the terrible things are all her fault, because Briony is a witch. Her anger and jealousy are dangerous because she can call up the Old Ones from the swamp, even if she doesn't intend to. At all costs she must prevent herself from hurting anyone else, particularly Eldric, with his "golden lion's eyes and a great mane of tawny hair," who stirs up more jealousy than ever. And isn't that odd, because Briony is too wicked to be able to love, isn't she?

The swamp is both setting and character, and Billingsley's poetic prose turns delicious every time Briony enters it:

My moonbeam skirts were pale moths, fluttering past the skulls of giant mushrooms. I sank into peat moss and autumn leaves, into the musk-stink of dying cabbage and the splosh of decay.

Voices laughed and ran past me in the shadows. I ran through a tangle of moonlight; I ran into a copper sea. If a body meet a body, comin' thro' the rye.

I was wild, I was wolfgirl. I was light as a moonbeam, my bones were filled with lace. I ran past chiming voices. "Pretty girl love pretty boy."

Chime is a puzzle. You will likely put the pieces together before Briony does, but will you figure it out before Eldric? Rose already knows.

This is a tasty novel, deep and layered, full of secrets: gingerbread with pears poached in red wine topped with cinnamon creme.

Canadian Book Week: Susan Juby

Alas, I am a fickle blogger! I'm not quite sure what has happened to the last three weeks. Perhaps I got caught in a time vortex because the Tardis was in the neighborhood. (Have you been watching the latest Doctor Who season? Crazy weird plot-lines! I loved the Neil Gaiman episode. But I digress.)(I actually know where the last week went, because since I began this review we decided to sell our house and buy a townhouse, and for some reason we decided to do everything this week, just because we weren't busy enough already. Sneaking the time to write this review was a bit therapeutic.)

I promised to do a Canadian book every month, and I'm a little late for May's, but we can pretend it's still May, can't we? Because I really must blog about Susan Juby. I just finished her latest, The Woefield Poultry Collective, and I was laughing so hard I was crying--which made the people in the park look rather strangely at me!

I think humour might be the hardest thing to write well, and Susan Juby is brilliant at it. She began with a young adult trilogy: Alice, I Think; Miss Smithers; and Alice MacLeod, Realist at Last. 

Alice is a teenager in the very small (and quite real) town of Smithers, BC, homeschooled by her vegetarian, pacificist, feminist mother ever since "a series of unfortunate social failures in first grade, connected to my mistaken belief that I was a hobbit." In Alice, I Think, she tries out high school, with mixed results, and "personal expression via fashion experimentation," with even more mixed results. In Miss Smithers, she becomes the Rod and Gun Club representative in the Miss Smithers Pageant, much to her mother's dismay:

My mother has been attempting maternal guidance. Her unsuccessful efforts have revealed the fascist tendencies just below the surface of most New Age practitioners and cemented my commitment to civic participation. If I wasn't already entered in the Miss Smithers contest for personal growth and financial gain, I'd now be in it for spite.

In Alice MacLeod, Realist At Last, her mother goes to jail after an environmental protest, her boyfriend leaves for Scotland after an awkward goodbye ("Our last chance to consummate our love. Ruined by a moose"), and Alice writes a screenplay. "I've channeled some of my anxiety into my art, but I still have quite a bit left over." Exotic fish, leather pants, and knitting play key roles in Alice's adventures, and she's helped through her self-actualization by a therapist nicknamed Death Lord Bob, a best friend ("More accurately, she is my only friend") who "looks sort of like how I used to before I started making an effort," and a younger brother who is "the only genuinely together person in our family. . . We all try to take our cues for how to behave from him." As the highly suspect narrator of her own embarrassing mishaps, Alice forges through all the issues of adolescence with a gawky sense of elan. If you have ever felt like you don't quite fit in, you will love Alice.

The Woefield Poultry Collective is Juby's latest, and her first for an adult audience. Doesn't it have an awesome title? (Be sure you get the Canadian edition: they named it Home to Woefield in the States, which is the lamest alternate title I've ever seen. Is "poultry" too difficult a word for Americans? Or is it "collective" that's the problem, with its scary socialist implications? What were the publishers thinking?)

Woefield has four hilariously unreliable narrators: Prudence, a city girl from New York who inherits her uncle's farm on Vancouver Island and decides to become an organic farmer; Earl, the old farm hand who doesn't know much about farming but plays a mean banjo; Seth, a twenty-something alcoholic recluse who shows up on Prudence's doorstep after his mother kicks him out; and Sara, a twelve-year old girl who raises competition chickens while her family falls apart. As if they didn't have enough problems between them, Juby throws in Bertie the depressed sheep, Eustace the very good-looking vet who disagrees with all of Prudence's environmental beliefs, and a bluegrass festival. Absurd situations abound (there's nothing like sheep for a little absurdity), and the characters' disparate reactions to each new crisis add layers to the humour.

You will find it particularly funny if you, like me, are a city girl with pretensions to sustainability: if you've tried vermiposting, if you've read The Omnivore's Dilemma and think small scale wholistic organic farming sounds wonderful, if you feel guilty every time you grocery shop because everything you buy harms something in some way. I was hooked from the moment Prudence described the death of her worms from being overwatered during a heat wave: "The poor things drowned and cooked, leaving a sort of warmed-over red wriggler soup."

Warning: there is strong language. Normally I would object, but I have to say that this book wouldn't be the same without Earl's colorful voice (several swear words in the following quotation):

I was trying to stay the hell out of the way, but when I saw the first shithouse fall off the truck, I thought, goddamn it, I'm going to have to get involved. No way around it.

That right there sums up the theme of The Woefield Poultry Collective: you deal with sh*t by getting involved.

Juby doesn't shy away from issues (even in her YA writing): alchoholism, divorce, sex, bullying are all treated realistically and with compassion. No easy answers, but perspective. Her humour is never cynical nor mocking (at least, not the bad kind of mocking, only the good kind): we are laughing with her characters, not at them.

If you need a good belly-laugh; if you need to feel that in the chaos of the universe events still might turn out for the best, I recommend Susan Juby. Like popsicles on a hot day, she's just the thing.

Kiersten White is very funny

She has a great blog*, and this post was brilliantly hilarious. I think she totally pulls off the second person future narration!

(If you want to see second person narration done brilliantly, read Italo Calvino's amazing book, If on a winter's night a traveller. Go to the link and click on the Look Inside; it has most of the first chapter so you can get a feel for it. Calvino alternates between chapters in second person, in which you, the Reader, are the protagonist, and chapters which are the book you are trying to read. Except that there's a problem with the book, and you end up reading the first chapter of a number of different books, each with its own style. And as you try to solve the mystery of the defective book and get a story that you can actually finish, you meet the Other Reader, who joins you on your quest. It's a lot of fun, and it's an homage to books and the reading experience, so if you consider yourself a Reader, you should read it.)

(As a writing exercise I tried my hand at Calvino's technique and wrote a sci-fi novella that alternates between second and third person and parodies a number of different sci-fi/fantasy tropes. It's really bad but I had a lot of fun doing it!)

(I think I could do an entire novel in parentheses: I bet that hasn't been done before!)

*This is the first time I've thought of a use for twitter: obviously sending you to read someone else's blog isn't a blog entry, but I felt like telling people about Kiersten White's post, so I guess I could have tweeted it. If I had a twitter account.(Actually I think I do have a twitter account, but I only ever used it once to enter a contest to win a Robin McKinley book. (I didn't win.) I'm not sure I even know how to get to it, or what user name or password I might use to access it.)(I feel about Twitter the way I feel about the butterfly stroke in swimming: I'm quite happy not knowing how to do it.)

The Folk Keeper, by Franny Billingsley

Oh, how frustrating! I had a whole review of this book almost complete, and blogger lost it. It was a good review, too. I compared The Folk Keeper to Wolves of Willoughby Chase: old stone house in lonely setting, supernatural menace, original use of traditional folklore elements. The difference is the narrator: Corin/Corinna is fierce and single-minded and not very nice, and yet our sympathies are entirely with her. She disguises herself as a boy so that she can have the post of Folk Keeper at the orphanage: her job is to draw off the malice of the invisible Folk who live under the house. It says much about her character that she lies and schemes to get this dangerous yet important position. She thinks this is everything she wants in life, but then she is brought to Marblehaugh Park (the old stone house in the lonely setting), and she learns things about herself that she had never imagined. I have to quote from the review at Amazon.com because she says it so well: a proud, ferociously self-reliant girl who breaks out of her dark, cold, narrow world into one of joy, understanding, and even . . . But that's more of a spoiler than I'm prepared to give. (Don't cheat and go read the Amazon review!) 


I said lots of other clever things that I can't remember now, but here's my conclusion:

The plot is original but has the inevitable feeling of a folktale: the orphan finds a home; the child discoveres her true identity. Corinna's journey into herself is surprising, convincing and satisfying. I found The Folk Keeper atmospheric and suspenseful, and quite, quite unique. (I think I may not wait for our library to get Chime; I don't usually buy books before I read them, but I feel pretty confident about Franny Billingsley as an author.)


The Folk Keeper is a salad of wild greens and bitter herbs with a few curls of Grana Padano cheese and a very light, lemony dressing, served with artisan bread and fresh butter.

The Chaos Walking trilogy, by Patrick Ness

I'm finally done: I had three hours of watching my son at circus practice, and I brought along writing to do but I brought Monsters of Men as well, thinking maybe I'd just read for an hour and then I'd put it down. Yeah, right. I wasn't quite done when circus was over, and I was just about prepared to let son and carpooler sit there and wait while I read the last few chapters. (I didn't, though. I mustered self-control and waited until I got home.) Then I had to wait for a few days before I had anything to say about it besides "Woah. Oh my. Holy crap. Wow. Mmmglfarb blither blither."

Monsters of Men lived up to the other two. It was intense, there were hard choices made and people didn't usually make the right ones, there were significant surprises and devastating moments. The end was unexpected and gut-wrenching and satisfying. (More satisfying than Mockingjay, just for the record.) I'm not going to say anything more about the plot, because this is a series you do not want spoilers for.

Patrick Ness can write. These are amazing books. Should you read them? Yes, if you like dystopias and post-apocalyptic men-reduced-to-the-best-and-worst-they-can-be types of stories. (It's not post-apocalyptic, it's actually settlers-on-a-new-planet, but you get the same sense.) Yes, if you like page-turning, nail-biting suspense and can handle present-tense semi-stream-of-consciousness narration (which is one of the things that bothered a lot of reviewers, but I thought it worked. Made everything visceral.) Yes if you can take a fair bit of violence. Yes if you don't mind science-fictiony concepts that aren't really well-explained—Ness requires you to suspend disbelief and just accept the concept of Noise with only a minimal framework to understand it in. (I think the series is less science fiction and more parable: let's put humans in this scenario and see what happens to them. The scenario happens to be new planet, aliens, strange form of telepathy, but we're not that interested in the details; we just want to see what the people do. It's kind of Shakespearean that way.)

I think these are the kind of books that you either love or hate. I loved them. I'm curious to know what you think.

(And those covers: are they not the best covers ever? Awesome titles, too. Just overall general awesomeness all around.)

I don't have a food analogy because reading these wasn't like eating. It was more like injecting a drug (not that I would know what that's like!)

Letters from Rapunzel, by Sara Lewis Holmes

I love libraries. You can go and browse and find all kinds of interesting-looking books and you can take them all home with you. And then if you don't get around to reading them, or you start reading them but they aren't as interesting as they looked, you just take them back, and it doesn't cost anything! (Unless you take them back late, but I always consider library fines to be my contribution to a worthy cause.)

I especially like it when I've been browsing blogs and I come up with lists of interesting-looking books, and then I go to my library and they have them! That happened the other day with Letters From Rapunzel. I was miserably sick, and I was browsing blogs because it was all I had the energy to do, and I came across Sara Lewis Holmes' blog (which had two great poems for Poetry Friday). Then I got sick of being stuck inside on a beautiful day so I went to the library (at least I was outside between my house and the library) and they had a whole bunch of the books I had found on the blogs, including Letters From Rapunzel. Score! It's like winning the jackpot. Then I came home and flopped on the couch feeling miserable and read Letters From Rapunzel, which is a quick read and a great story and made me feel much better.

"Rapunzel" is stuck in after school Homework Club because her father is in the hospital with a serious bout of depression and her mother works. Signing her name as Rapunzel because she feels as though she is locked in a tower, she begins writing letters to someone she thinks is a friend of her father's, asking for help saving her father from the Evil Spell he's under. The entire story is told in letter form; even when she doesn't get a response she continues writing as she tries to make sense of her father's illness and her own problems fitting in and meeting everyone's expectations.

Funny, imaginative, and perceptive, Rapunzel is a wonderful narrator. She can't ever do a homework project the way her teachers want, and her letters often include her wacky assignments. She weaves fairy tales and poetry into her letters, which become a diary of self-discovery. (We know she is getting somewhere when she finally signs her real name: Cadence.) Giving up on getting rescued by her unknown correspondent, Cadence takes matters into her own hands, with funny and poignant results. The Happily Ever After she comes up with is not the one she wanted, but it's one she creates for herself.

You'll like this book if you like first-person quirky narrators and if you like playing with fairy tale conventions and if you believe in poetry. I found it sweet and light with a serious heart; I truly cared about Cadence and her family, and her story's resolution was realistic and satisfying. A perfect afternoon-stuck-on-the-couch book.

Letters from Rapunzel is a homemade doughnut (the yeast kind, not the cake kind) with apple jelly filling and powdered sugar on top.

(And yes, I'm reading the last Chaos Walking book, but it's really intense: lots more bad things are happening to the characters and I don't want more bad things to happen to them! So I'm interspersing it with rereading the Mortal Instruments series before starting The City of Fallen Angels (fourth book of a trilogy, wouldn't you know.)

The Ask and the Answer, by Patrick Ness

I'm jumping up and down screaming "aaarrrggggh!" and tearing my hair and banging my head against the wall. Book 2 lives up to Book 1, with a vengeance. (The library has Book 3, but I have taxes I have to do!)

A warning: if you thought The Hunger Games was too violent and depressing, DO NOT read these books. If you only like books where the good guys win, do not even pick these ones up. (That's not a spoiler: in these books there are no good guys. They're so morally complex you want to tear your hair out. But there's definitely a worser guy, whoo, boy, does this series have a villain!)