Campfire Reads Review: Bell Weather
“A universe of trees in a universe of night, a million dark spires, an infinity of leaves...”
Author: Dennis Mahoney
Goodreads Description: A captivating adventure set in a fantastical world where a young woman must uncover the secrets of her past while confronting the present dangers of a magical wilderness.
I went into this book expecting a very different story than what I ended up with. That is in no way the author’s fault. I assume all guilt for my preconceptions. When I picked up Bell Weather, I was on the hunt for a good fantasy novel set in the woods, and I may have let that color my reading of the book’s synopsis. This is one of the many reasons I would make a terrible scientist. My hypothesis was that Bell Weather was a fantasy novel, but it’s actually closer to historical fiction set in a wooded fantasy land. If I were a researcher conducting an experiment that attempted to debunk the negative effects of caffeine, I’d be the one behind the two-way mirror, switching all the cups to decaf.
I feel like I spent much of this novel waiting for something “fantastic” to happen, instead of enjoying the story. Again, totally my fault. The fantasy elements that are in the book are rarely integral to the plot, which is too bad, because they are very well done. They mostly involve the strange natural phenomena of Floria, the fictitious land in which the story is set. One such phenomenon was St. Verna’s Fire, a form of lightning that clings like static to everything in its path (including people).
“The light kept shifting, fading in one place and surging up brighter somewhere else. Molly touched the windowpane and filaments appeared, glowing and electric where her fingers met the glass.”
When Molly tries to save a boy who catches “fire,” her lack of familiarity with the lightning only causes more harm. I, personally, loved this part of the book and was sad to find that it only appears once in the whole novel. In fact, pretty much every fantastic element appears exactly once, which is a shame, because they are all captivating and wildly creative.
Another example of this is a dense fog called waterbreath that Molly encounters when out at sea:
“The fog approached the [ship] like a tidal wave, as wide as she could see from starboard to port–pale, faintly blue, and ominously silent…Molly felt as if a saturated bag were on her head. She gasped and couldn’t breathe...”
When I read this chapter, I felt like my own throat was closing up. It was beautiful and terrifying all at once, and when it was over, I wanted more.
I guess that’s how I would sum up my overall feelings about this book: I wanted more. More waterbreath, more clinging lightning, more wisps and other strange creatures haunting the woods. Most of all, I wanted those fantastic elements to be more integral to the plot itself. As it is, they function more as set dressing.
Did I mention I went into this totally biased?
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