Snakes alive: Awakening by S. J. Bolton

Awakening by S. J. Bolton (F BOL Main)

Reviewed by Jeanne

Clara Benning is a veterinary surgeon specializing in wildlife rehabilitation in a small English village, a position she chose, in part, because it allows her minimal contact with people.Clara was horribly injured as a child and those physical scars have made her reluctant to expose herself to the stares and comments people are prone to make. Besides, she likes animals of all sorts, and working with wildlife means she doesn’t often have to deal with any owners:only the animal itself.Her reclusive ways don’t endear her to the villagers but she’s known to be very good at her work and very knowledgeable--which is why she gets the call that changes her life.

With the exception of the adder, most British snakes are quite harmless to humans.That fact is lost on the hysterical mother who calls Clara. She only knows that there is a snake in her daughter’s crib. Clara rushes over, expecting to find a grass or garter snake, but realizes to her horror that it is indeed an adder lying on the infant’s chest. Using all her skills, she tries to extricate the snake before the baby can be harmed.

This turns out to be just the beginning. A man dies, apparently from snakebite, but the amount of venom is more than one snake could possibly produce. A deadly taipan— a snake native to Australia and New Guinea—shows up in the village. It isn’t long before both Clara and the authorities realize that something very unnatural is going on, and that there must be a human hand behind some of these “accidents.”

The difference is that the police think that hand might belong to Clara.

I thoroughly enjoyed Bolton’s first book, Sacrifice, and Awakening was just as exciting. She has the knack of creating memorable characters as well as supplying the reader with a great deal of factual information without lecturing. In this book, she brings in a lot of snake lore as well as Roman customs and –amazingly enough!—information about the snake-handling churches in America.(Clara is the daughter of an Anglican bishop and so is conversant with the relevant scripture.) Her settings are wonderfully realized:I could almost smell the damp and feel the chill of the stone in the house. Her prose is clear and clean, and she uses both character and place to ratchet up the tension.

A colleague was disturbed by the revelation as to how Clara came to be disfigured as a baby.I was so anxious to find out how the story turned out that I confess I skimmed over that section but as I recall the violence was strongly implied rather than graphic.

There are some injuries to animals in the book, something else I usually find off-putting, but Bolton handles it sensitively. The underlying respect and love that Clara has for her charges helped in that respect.The enthusiasm of a globe-trotting herpetologist for all things serpentine felt genuine, although I still don’t want my own snake, thank you very much.

However, I do want another book by S. J. Bolton. Her next one is entitled Blood Harvest and is scheduled for June, 2010.