Tart, sad, funny, passionate, sensuous-Briony is all of these. But when Eldric comes to board at the family parsonage, bringing a young man’s energy and his “busy London blood pumping just inches away,” she begins to dig up suppressed memories. Now Stepmother’s dead, and Briony hates herself, has sacrificed her future to care for Rose, forbids herself the joys of her beloved swamp, and fears her outing (and subsequent hanging) as a witch. “We mustn’t ever tell your father,” Stepmother said. She avers that she is also responsible for Stepmother’s injuries in a tidal wave. She believes that out of childish jealousy of the attention Stepmother lavished on her twin sister, Rose, she called up the Old Ones, and Rose was brain-damaged in a violent windstorm. Narrator Briony Larkin is a self-proclaimed witch. And more: how exceptionally well Billingsley uses it to do so. “Ooze and muck and the clean muddy smell of life” suffuse Billingsley’s long-awaited third work of fiction, which mingles “Tam Lin,” “Lord Randall,” and its own swampy folklore into an entirely original concoction-and which confirms, yet again, how aptly fairy tale expresses the emotional landscape of adolescence.
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