“She and the Amstelvoort had come to a cautious understanding over the years and yet, Her thorns were always a little too close for comfort, like a blade held against her back in warning.”

Songs of Broken Bells by Lilly Lockwood takes place in a lovingly crafted and magical world with echoes of classical fantasy, but unfortunately, the story didn’t quite come together for me.

Líadan is an oerent-a nonhuman being born at the behest of the world’s many “saints”, who seem to function like little gods, using their oerents to do their work in the world. After an oerent is born, they are usually left for adoption until claimed by their saint. But Líadan is unusual. Now an adult, she is still (she thinks) unclaimed, and she’s spent most of her life placed in the care of a peaceful selvestra named Vasil, a tree-like being who has been charged with ensuring that she keeps her devastating magical power in check. She lives a relatively tranquil life with Vasil for many years, deep within the Amstelvoort, the living forest of the sevelstra, until one day she reflexively kills a forest creature out of fear and she and Vasil set out on a quest to try to rid her of her magic forever.

Broken Bells starts in a very cozy, almost fairy tale like manner. Lockwood lavishes a lot of detail on the forest setting and all the little rituals of village life; in fact, it reminded me very much of the beginning of the Fellowship of the Ring, as the Shire prepares for Bilbo Baggins’ birthday. Adding to this atmosphere are the footnotes left by the framing narrator, which provide extra information and little asides about the world and the characters. There are lots of potions being prepared, tea brewing, plant hunting and harvesting, and people mostly being kind to each other.

I actually liked this old-fashioned, epic fantasy aspect of the book a lot. Líadan’s conflict remains simmering beneath, providing enough tension that the coziness feels like a direct response to the conflict centered on her and within her. Vasil is being kind to her because not everyone thinks she deserves it, and that makes it feel like something is happening even when it isn’t.

For the first third of the book, I thought we were in a store for a more modern riff on a classic fantasy plot with a female nonhuman playing the part of the hidden farmboy Chosen One. The pace was a little slow in places and there was some inconsistent head-hopping between POVs, but overall, I was enjoying myself in the world. Then Líadan finds out which saint claims her, and the story abruptly takes a very dark turn.

I am not against dark turns, as a rule, but this one was quite jarring. It felt not just out of place with the coziness of the first 30% of the book but more importantly, with the way the characters themselves had been portrayed. It also brought me up hard against the terminology that was being used.

Bells borrows Catholic terminology–“patron saints” and “hagiography” (the biography of the saints)–I think to give the world a medieval flair. But I felt like the use of “saints” here didn’t quite work in the way intended.

The saints in this world function more like the countless local and household deities of the ancient Mediterranean, who both governed and personified attributes so much that they were often named for them– Truth, Fortune, Discord, etc. But Catholic saints are different.

Everyone who’s died and gone to heaven is technically a little s-saint, whether anyone remembers their name or not. Big S Saints, like St. Jude or St. Therese or St. Anthony, are awarded their capital letters because they’ve done miracles that have been vetted as credible by the Church. Catholic Saints are intercessors, like friends to ask for help. So, for instance, a beekeeper might ask St. Abigail–the patron saint of beekeepers—to watch over his bees. If you need help with an impossible situation, ask St. Jude. Need help finding something lost? Go to St. Anthony. There aren’t really patrons of Truth and definitely no patrons of War or Pain, though there are patrons of soldiers (St. Martin of Tours) or patrons of people in pain–the sick, the injured. (St. Agatha, for example, is the patron of victims of rape or torture.)

I know the first 30% of a book is usually fair game in a review, but because the shift in tone is pretty extreme (or at least I found it so), I’m going to warn of a mild spoiler here so you can scroll down if you’d rather find out for yourself.

Start of Spoilers

Líadan discovers that her “saint” is the patron of torture and pain. His oerants basically run around like lunatics, not only madly wreaking havoc and destruction, but enjoying it. While this is definitely the kind of conflict that could fuel an absorbing plot (a good person discovers she’s destined to serve an evil god), it felt out of place for this book, which had mostly been about people being nice to each other up to this point and now suddenly it’s about how the MC might legitimately go crazy in her service to a psychopathic supernatural being and not only kill families with children but enjoy doing it. (To be clear, this doesn’t happen at 30%; Líadan is just afraid it will, and she has a vision where she sees herself doing this.)

All right, spoiler space over.

I don’t feel like some fantasy violence would have been out of place in the story, and maybe, if there had been a “fallen angel” vibe from the beginning, I might have kept going despite the head-hopping and the places where the pace bogged down in favor of a little too much worldbuilding, because I was enjoying myself. I am a sucker for nature and domestic rituals in fantasy stories. But the sudden shift to emotional darkness gave me a little too much vertigo.

So, it was really a combination of the problems I mentioned, topped off by my feeling that the cozy and the dark weren’t integrated as well as they could have been. The author does provide content warnings and I did read them, but content warnings can be pretty general. I didn’t feel like they substituted for tone.

If you’re a reader who likes densely built worlds with nonhuman characters and lots of cozy tangents but also dark themes, you might enjoy this one. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite come together for me.