The Bells

by Richard Harvell

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I love the books which transport me through time. With “The Bells” I travelled through 18th century from Swiss Alps to St. Gall, then Vienna, then Venice, in the romantic period when beautiful music could make people stop what they are doing and bring tears to their eyes. Along the way I learned about love, passion, pain and injustice. But, more than anything, I learned about the sound.

The book made me become aware of the sounds that surround me, of so many different shades of “noise” we live in. It made me long to hear all the wonderful sounds the author is describing with such emotions throughout the book. It almost seems as if the sound is another character in this tale of a few wonderfully imperfect characters.

There’s one thing that made me withhold the fifth star - I felt that Amalia, the love of Moses’ life and the main female character, wasn’t brought close enough. She featured as an object of Moses’ passion and adoration, but as a reader I didn’t get to know her nearly as much as I wished.

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