Customer Reviews

Chime

5 star:		(32)
4 star:		(24)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

After the death of her step mother, Briony is left with so much guilt and believes the only way anyone else can be happy is for her to hate herself. She blames herself for the death of her step mother and her twin sister Rosy's mental illness. Briony has to keep this secret to herself because if she reveals it she will be killed, for being a witch.

Briony just broke my heart. She would deny herself many things because she believed she wasn't capable of loving anyone or bad things will happen. I really wanted her to realize she wasn't a bad person and even though she said she was jealous and didn't like her sister it was obvious how much she truly cared about Rosy. I loved Briony's character even though she didn't like herself all too well.

Rosy's character is one that will forever be young at heart. She was an interesting character. Even though she was perceived to not have an understanding of things Rosy turned out to be the most aware of what was around her than everyone else did. There were many secrets she kept to herself which I was curious to find out what they could possibly be.

The relationship with Briony and Eldric was really sweet. Eldric was someone Briony needed in her life in order to overcome all of the negative feelings she had for herself.

The ending was such a wonderful surprise. For some reason I didn't see it coming even though it was pretty much hinted at throughout the whole book.

The writing was so beautiful with a somewhat classic fairy tale feel to it, which I absolutely adored! I would highly recommend reading Chime to those who love magic, fantasy, mystery, romance, and oh so brilliant, wonderful, amazing, lovable characters.

Just a small warning: this review is bound to be full of praise, fangirly gushing, and positive adjectives. I will not apologize for this...

This book was absolutely gorgeous. Every word was an indulgence along the same lines as chocolate. And just like chocolate I wanted to savor it and gobble it up at the same time.
I knew from the first page that Chime was something special. Something completely different than other books I have read and that knowledge only intensified as I continued to read. The writing was completely incredible. I was a little awestruck. Franny Billingsley has a amazing gift and I hope that she continues to share it for a long time to come.

Chime is about the very wicked girl named Briony. She's so wicked because she's an Old One, a witch. This is a secret she has kept for years. Briony hates herself. She doesn't love anyone. Shes incapable of crying, and she tells you these things countless times, but you as the reader can see all the things that Briony can't. You will probably figure out the truth about her long before she does, but watching the story unravel and the puzzle pieces fit together is the beautiful thing about this book.

Briony tells you her story and her recount of the events is honest and witty. Her relationship and romance with Eldric was well developed.The banter between the two of them was fantastically done. It had me smiling many times. Rose, Briony's twin sister played a very big role in the story and I though she was a great addition to the already wonderful cast of characters.

The world in which Chime takes place is perfectly created. I saw no flaws in it whatsoever. The Swapsea and the Old Ones were unique. I won't say that I have read lots of Fantasy, but I will say I have read my fair share and the world in Chime is one of my all time favorites. It left me dying for more!

I'm going to stop now because I could probably continue gushing for a long time to come. I just want to say that you must read this book! I hope you love it half as much as I did. (That would still be a lot!) I will definitely be reading Billingsley's past books and devouring anything that she writes in the future.

I'm giving this book four stars rather than three stars because the characters were so vivid and real that they made the book for me. Briony especially. Her voice is so strong and so distinct that it's unbelievably refreshing to read about in a first person YA novel, where too many first person narrators blur together. Briony can be no one but Briony. She's complex, strong willed, and doesn't always make the right decisions even though she thinks they're right at the time. Eldric, her love interest, was also wonderful. He and Briony worked so well together, and I'm pleased to say that their relationship seemed real. It was based on young love rather than young lust. Their interactions, as in their formation of the Fraternitus Bad-Boyificus and their jokes and banter, felt very real.

The magic in this book is also fascinating, as is the setting (near a swamp). The whole idea of witches turning to dust once they've been hanged and and magical creatures living in the swamp was amazing.

The only quibble I have with the book is the nebulous plot. I don't think it's as developed as it could be. In fact, I think the book would be much better if it were tightened considerably. It felt too much like the characters (wonderful though they were) wandering around bumping into things. (Briony goes somewhere. She talks to Eldric. She has internal monologues. She decides to do something. She does it. She has internal monologues. She talks to Eldric. She talks to Rose. She finds all sorts of reasons why she can't act for at least a week, which then means that she will do more talking to Eldric and Rose, etc...) It wasn't that there wasn't a plot, it was that it wasn't as tight as it could be, so all the little scenes of her walking and talking and thinking lacked focus. Part of this had to do with the style of writing - lots and lots of dialogue and internal thoughts, very, very little on the setting or actions. I liked Briony's voice a lot, and I liked the wittiness of her thoughts, but the lack of concrete description of the setting made the book, for me, lack an anchor. You get a line here and there about the peeling wall paper, and the golden rye fields, and the blue and white painted sheets in the garden party, like little minnows of description that flash by before you can catch hold of them. In the book Briony talks about the hollow bird bones of her hand, and I feel that image aptly describes the book itself. It was all voice, without the solidity of plot to focus and bolster it except with a few feather light touches.

What surprises and twists there were I found predictable. I figured them out very early on. However, the joy in this case is not in being surprised, but in watching Briony discover what you already know.

I hope my review does not seem wholly negative. The problem is that there's only so much praise you can give before you start to babble, or give things away. It's easier to come up with concrete reasons of what you didn't like than what you liked. You should read this book. It's worth it. Getting to know Briony, and Eldric, and Rose, is worth it. What you ultimately should be considering is whether you should buy this or check this out from the library. If you are unsure, check this out from the library. Spending more time in a library is never, ever a bad thing.

Shaking my Magic 8 Ball here...Will Chime win any literary awards? "Without a doubt." Will YA readers flock to Chime? "Don't count on it."

Some books are meant to be appreciated as much as they are to be enjoyed. There aren't many YA books of literary quality. Of the books I've read in the past year, only Jellicoe Road; Will Grayson, Will Grayson; and Revolution come to mind. Literary books take work to read. You can't just be immersed in the plot. You have to think while you're reading to absorb the careful meaning the author places in the prose. While more difficult, this can transform a book from interesting to extraordinary. I enjoyed Chime once I got used to it, but it never made that leap from a well-written book to something that made an indelible mark in my mind like Jellicoe Road and Revolution.

Briony, our narrator, is one of the most miserable characters you'll find. Convinced that she's an evil witch who hurts everyone around her, she despises herself. She holds everyone back, so she can't hurt them. Eldric, the new lion-boy, refuses to stay away. He brings light into her life and that scares her. Pretty soon, she has to decide not only if she'll open herself to Eldric, but if she's willing to brave the witch-hating townspeople to save her village and sister from the evil swamp spirits.

The plot sounds crazy, but it Briony's world really is fascinating. There's just a hint of fantasy and the rest reads like a historical novel. It took me a long time to understand what was going on, but once I did, the plot flowed pretty smoothly.

The characters and writing is much more important than the plot for Chime. The prose is beautiful. The author clearly put great thought into every sentence she wrote. It reads like poetry. Chime is basically written in a stream of consciousness mode. The book shows every thought that's going through Briony's head. Like anyone else, Briony's thoughts often veer into tangents that seemingly have nothing to do with the current situation, but are somehow linked in her mind. It makes the book confusing and choppy, but so insightful.

Briony is a fascinating character. Her self-hatred colors all her thoughts, making her an unreliable narrator. At the same time, she carefully observes life around her. Her comments about her father, deceased stepmother, sister, the village-people, Eldric, and even about nature were very different than the way most people think. It was like putting on a pair of glasses with too high of a prescription. Everything you see is sharpened yet distorted. I also loved her sister Rose. Rose is mentally disabled in some way. Despite her limitations or perhaps because of them, she sees people clearly. Her simple statements were often more insightful and accurate than Briony's.

Chime is a beautiful book with well-developed characters, a complex plot, and incredible prose. It is one of those books that can be read over and over just to contemplate the wording. While I appreciated the literary quality, Chime just never made the leap from being appreciated to being loved.

Rating: 3.5 / 5

Briony Larkin deals with self hatred all the time. She believes she's bad because after all her name comes from a poisonous vine. Plus, villainous creatures in the swamp refer to her as their mistress. She's been told that no one is to know of her being a witch. So when an engineer and his son come to drain the swamp that is vital to her sister's protection she must face the difficulty of revealing her secret to save her twin.

This book is difficult to review. Was it mysterious? Did it keep me guessing? Was it different? Yes, yes, and yes, however I wouldn't say I liked this book. It's odd to say, but I think it was the writing style that threw me. There were parts where Briony would randomly break into weird little poems. They were kind of nonsensical to me. I guess if you were seeing a movie you'd imagine those parts as being eerie and creepy and it would work,but reading those parts were just annoying to me. The reading flow just seemed hindered.

Another problem for me was too much action would take place in the swamp, and I would be lost as to what just happened. I guess because Briony is such an unreliable narrator and guarded, we the reader only know so much, and what we do know gets confusing.

Rose is her identical twin who seems a bit slow, but in reality is pretty smart.That is one good thing about this book though. The characters are well fleshed out and despite being confused, I felt sympathetic towards them. As the book goes on you'll probably go through three of four different scenarios of what could have happened and that was a bit fun.

Towards the end it was more exciting, but the first half just complicated the experience for me.

Overall the book was just okay to me, but all over the net the reviews are just glowing with praise. So maybe it's just not my cup of tea, maybe it will be yours. Judge for yourself peeps.

This book received a starred review from basically every professional reviewing publication - School Library Journal, Booklist, Kirkus - and here I am, unable to even finish it.

While I acknowledge "Chime"'s originality and high quality of writing, I believe this is a novel that will appeal to only a very specific type of reader who is looking for some eccentric fantasy. The whole cast of characters, the world, the interactions are all what you call "quirky," but many (I) would call bizarre. The main character, Briony, is a very charismatic narrator, in a vein of "We Have Always Lived in the Castle"'s Merricat. She is funny and interesting, but at the same time infinitely odd.

To put it simply, "Chime" was not a book for me. The narrator's voice was so hard to relate to, I had to abandon the story after about 70 pages. I strongly recommend everyone to read a couple of chapters before buying this novel to see if it's a story to your taste.

It's hard to get into a book when the narrator loathes themself. It kind of sets a depressing tone, doesn't it? But Billingsley's strength lies in the complexity and well-roundedness of her characters, and our narrator and protagonist, a 17 year old girl named Briony, is no exception. It was hard for me to get into the book at first, simply because Briony was so self-loathing, but soon I grew attached to her sharp wit, and the deeper emotions hiding just beneath the surface of her narrative.

I'll admit, I almost gave up on this book. I have a rule that if I'm still not into a book by around pages 50-80, I won't waste any more time. But for some reason I didn't want to quit on this one just yet. After reading some reviews by others who said it takes a while to get into the story, I decided to read a little bit more. I'm glad I did. The story definitely did pick up, and I began to get to know the characters better, I began to get wholly involved in the story, turning page after page (instead of checking to see what page I was on, and how many more pages were left).

It's definitely a stranger story, and a bit confusing at times. But Billingsley is a strong writer, and she paints pictures in a unique way. There were many beautiful descriptions in this book, and Billingsley created a strange, fantastic world unlike any I'd been in before. Sometimes the writing got in the way of the story, but overall I liked it. And the relationship between Briony and Edric was fun, sweet, and I'd even say genuine - a refreshing change from a lot of the love-at-first-sight relationships you see in YA books.

I'd say give this book a chance. If you don't like it by page 100, you probably won't like it at all. But it starts slow and definitely develops into a unique and interesting tale.

Chime by Franny Billingsley is one of those books I discovered on Goodreads and immediately knew I'd love based on the synopsis (and the gorgeous cover). Briony has a guilty secret - she is a witch. A witch who has destroyed her family: she blames herself for her sister's mental disability, her home being victim to both fire and flood and the death of her stepmother. She only feels at home in the swamp, but before her stepmother died she warned Briony that the swamp only made her powers worse. Then handsome Eldric moves into town and makes Briony question everything.

Well, I was so right: I did love this book! I fell in love with it from the first sentence and remained enchanted through the whole story. Briony is one of a kind - her narration was at times angry, sad, eerie, hopeful, scary...but always bewitching. Always interesting. There is no way to see the world through her eyes and not feel drawn to her and wonder about the things she believed she has done. I knew early on that things were not as they seemed - certainly not exactly how Briony saw them - but I definitely did not expect things to unfold the way they did.

Eldric is a great character too - I absolutely adored the different ways Briony described him. The descriptive language she uses is very original...but very Briony. I don't remember the last time an author was able to so successfully create someone so complex and layered (not to mention quirky and oddball) and keep the characterization so consistent. Her voice is very distinctive - the blend of wit and irony kept me constantly entertained:

"In a proper story, antagonistic sparks would fly between Eldric and me, sparks that would sweeten the inevitable kiss on page 324. But life doesn't work that way. I didn't hate Eldric, which, for me, is about as good as things get."

I also loved her descriptions of the other characters:

"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 your gut like a worm.

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

No, our family doesn't talk much."

***

"She spoke in a dark-river sort of voice, as though her throat were filled with dusk. She was staying in a village not twenty miles off, but her dusky voice made it sound like an island of spicy winds and bursting pineapples. Just the place to be marooned."

I really cannot recommend reading this book enough - a constantly compelling fantasy plot, an intriguing and malevolent swamp setting and a set of the most quirky and captivating characters you'll ever come across.

CHIME has received countless starred reviews and a nearly equal array of praise and protestation from bloggers. Suffice it to say that I went into this book with equal parts anticipation and trepidation. A book couldn't possibly live up to all that praise, I thought. At best, I thought, I will like this book, but I won't love it.

Briony Larkin is wicked. She's had to live all 17 years of her life with the knowledge that she was responsible for her identical twin sister Rose's brain defect and her Stepmother's death. That's because Briony is a witch: she can see the Old Ones, the magical creatures that live in and near the swamp, and if anyone in the Swampsea finds out that she's a witch, then she will be hanged.

When Eldric arrives in the Swampsea, he is like a breath of fresh air in Briony's life. Eldric makes her come alive in ways she didn't even know she could anymore. But witches don't love, and witches don't cry, and if Eldric doesn't watch out, Briony's going to be the cause of his death.

But oh, I loved it. Oh, how I did. CHIME completely won me over, and I am in nonstop raptures about its genius. Seriously. It might be a good thing you are not in my vicinity right now. Otherwise I'd be floating and spinning in circles around you in my enrapturement.

When I say that CHIME won me over, it really did have to win me over. The first 150 or so pages were craAaAaAaAazy! I was really confused, because the book throws us right in the middle of Briony's narration, and she's not exactly the most objective of narrators. She is a great example of a successful unreliable narrator, because everything she narrates is colored by her own charged perception of things.

Briony is so vehement in her self-hatred that she very nearly makes us hate her as well. A person who spends her whole life thinking that she's wicked and hating herself will obviously have a great deal of trouble thinking otherwise. And yet Briony also has a wicked sense of humor--and by "wicked," I mean in the best way possible. She is like a magical, irresistible combination of Anne Shirley's whimsy and--well, I can't think of who her wit is like, but yeah, she's a combination of wit and whimsy, which makes her completely and utterly cool.

Briony's narration may be confusing at first, but if you give yourself a solid chunk of time to read CHIME, by page 200 you will be so engrossed in these characters' stories that you will not want to put this book down. Perhaps most incredible is how well we come to know and love supporting characters such as Eldric and Rose through Briony's voice. Eldric, the boy-man with an irrepressible love of kind-hearted playing. Rose, brain-damaged but still beautifully artistic, and all the more precious for her unique and childlike take on the world. CHIME celebrates childhood and play, and suggests that the best kind of love comes from these nearly magical moments of youthfulness.

There is so much more I could say about CHIME, and so much more within this book that deserves to be talked about. But I could go on and on for pages and pages, and nothing would compare to reading this book yourself, to see if it is, too, your brand of magic. I wasn't expecting to love CHIME, but now it's one of my favorite books of all time, an impressive accomplishment of writing magic. Now excuse me, while I go and reread it.

I wish that my rating system went beyond five stars, because Chime is THAT good. Billingsley created a dark and mysterious world that sucked me in and made me want to stay forever! The romance was sweet and the twists and turns just as well.

Briony thinks she's something awful and hates herself. She can't feel love, happiness, sadness, and she can't cry. I loved Briony. Somehow, even though she's one tough cookie, I felt pain and sadness. I saw that she seemed to want to change her `ways' but was uncertain if that's what she REALLY wanted or just thought it was right. She's the perfect main character, because she's dark and secretive, but also sweet in her own way.

Briony's sister, Rose, was one odd girl. Briony blames herself for a terrible accident that happened when Rose and her were young. Rose likes to scream when something goes wrong and sometimes she's very repetitive. I actually really enjoyed Rose's quirkiness and her creative energy. I was very surprised to find that she was much more clever than I had anticipated!

Eldric...now draw a heart around that name and that's all I would need to say! ;) He is one of my favorite love interests ever! The romance was sweet and fun and almost forbidden. Eldric was so sweet and thought highly of Briony. He didn't quite understand why she thought so badly of herself. Eldric made her laugh, have fun, and want to cry.

The creatures Billingsley created in this story are really unique. I mean Boggy Mun, the Dead Hand, and the like. The descriptions were out of this world. It is fascinating that someone could work up a world like this one!

I must admit, at first I was utterly lost in the thick and incredibly descriptive sentences. I had to slow down and savor each sentence, otherwise things flew right over my head. I took it slow and it made reading it much better.

Gosh, overall, I would give this book a million stars. I would love to dive right back into the amazing world and story Billingsley thought up. Chime is a must read...so please go pick it up and start it now!

Review based on ARC copy