Honeyed Words: Belladonna by Anne Bishop

Belladonna by Anne Bishop · 4 May 2007

Belladonna (the second book in the Ephemera duology) picks up where Sebastian left off, a scant two months after Belladonna ended the first chapter of the battle against the Eater of the World by scattering It’s followers.

In the month since that confrontation, Sebastian and Lynnea have married, as have Belladonna’s mother and her sweetheart Jeb. It’s no wonder that our introduction to this novel is Belladonna’s yearning for a life partner, one who can accept the strange combination of light and darkness that has led her peers to shun her. And it’s no surprise that Bishop introduces a likely young man, Michael, as her first new character in the book.

As Bishop builds on the world she introduced in Sebastian, she uses new characters, Michael, his sister Caitlin, their aunt Brighid, to illustrate some of the things that Glorianna Belladonna has taken for granted. Some truths in Ephemera are not known to all it’s inhabitants.

Michael comes from a section of the world that wasn’t broken in the last great war against the Eater of the World. Unlike all those that Belladonna holds dear, the people in Michael’s Landscape don’t take their lives in their hearts when they cross a bridge, don’t have to trust that their desires will bring them to the correct destination on the other side, and don’t know what purpose the Landscapers serve. Belladonna has been worrying over the solution to defeat the Eater of the World, and Ephemera itself takes a hand in uniting her with the answers, through these characters.

I enjoyed Bishop’s use of characters as a method to reveal the solution of how to contain the Eater of the World. She spent the time to develop Michael, to share his history and his hurts, in a way that made him much more believable than Sebastian was in the first novel. The tension between Michael and Sebastian and Lee in their roles of the male protectors of Belladonna also lent a touch of realism to this charmed world where romance seemed to blossom without barrier in the first book.

I thought Bishop did a better job with the world building in Belladonna than she did in Sebastian as well. The plot wasn’t as cluttered with factions, names, and concepts as it was in Sebastian. Instead, Bishop let the characters tell their story, and through their story and their journey the elements of this new slice of Ephemera revealed themselves.

As has been my experience with her previous works, Bishop’s character interactions were the strength in this novel. The book reads most strongly when the characters are interacting with each other, in pleasant banter or deadly earnest. Bishop has a talent for creating strong family bonds and strong female characters that lead those strong families. She also creates quirky traits, memorable phrases, and human foibles that bring each character’s personality to life. At the end of the story, she even engenders sympathy for the villain by presenting It’s all too human yearnings.

Fans of the Black Jewels Trilogy will notice symmetry with the resolution of this story and that one and, for me, it detracted a bit from the ending. Though Bishop was true to her vision of the world, I felt that she could have thought up a different way for Belladonna to take up her charge to save it, and could have led to a conclusion that wasn’t quite as heroic, but would have been less trite. Bishop also failed to address the lingering followers that were the sub-focus of Sebastian. I was left thinking “So, they just sat on their heels and waited for the end?”

Despite its flaws, I’d still recommend Belladonna on the strength of it’s characters, as a sumptuous indulgence for the senses, and as a heart warming reminder of the strength of the bonds of family. The pure enjoyment of the dialogue and involvement with the characters sublimed the deeper questions of the story and caught me up in the mystique of Ephemera.

Anne Bishop, Belladonna, Ephemera, Fantasy, Good Versus Evil, Light and Darkness, Romance