BOOK REVIEW: Chime

Title: Chime


Author: Franny Billingsley

Publisher: Bloomsbury

RRP:

ISBN: 9780747583813

Release Date: April 2011

Pages: 368



Description:



Briony knows she is a witch. She knows that she is guilty of hurting her beloved stepmother. She also knows that, now her stepmother is dead, she must look after her beautiful but complicated twin sister, Rose. Then the energetic, electric, golden-haired Eldric arrives in her home town of Swampsea, and everything that Briony thinks she knows about herself and her life is turned magically, dizzyingly, upside down.

Review:



CHIME is a very unique, original, YA historical, paranormal story with the main character, Briony Larkin who is a witch. She can never let herself forget that. She's killed her stepmother, jumbled her twin sister's mind, and called up a great fire in her own home--things that she must never let others discover, or she'll be hanged. Caught up in self-loathing, Briony goes through life in somewhat of a daze, pretending to be a normal girl. But when she discovers that her town's modernization is causing upset among the Old Ones--creatures that live within the swamp--she must do something, or everyone she cares for will be in danger.



The plot, which starts off with a compelling first chapter, doesn't truly pick up until almost the end, when the mystery becomes revealed at last. With the end's illumination, everything in the story came together. CHIME has a brilliantly written twisted plot. There's a lot that Franny throws into the plot via her characters.