For Whom the Belle Tolls by Jaysea Lynn is a romantasy that began life as a TikTok skit. Proving the old adage that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, it is also a meditation on grief, loss, love, friendship, family, allyship, and what it means to really live. Throw in some spicy scenes, an unusual presentation of what the afterlife could be, and a great deal of sass, and you have brewed my own personal cup of tea.
When we first meet Lily, she’s just received the worst news of her entire life and her car won’t fucking start. It figures that her always reliable Toyota Corolla would crap out on her in her oncologist’s parking lot after she’s just gotten her terminal cancer diagnosis. She’s only 34, ffs. She hasn’t really lived yet.
After she has a bit of a breakdown, her car finally starts and she heads home to share the news with her parents and brothers. The cancer has spread everywhere and metastasized. There will be no cure. She has maybe a year left. She moves in with her parents and spends as much time with them and with her brothers as she can.
It’s an awkward time – Lily’s parents love her, but don’t understand why she has fallen away from the church and are worried about her going to Hell. They don’t understand how the religious upbringing that they raised her in could have resulted in a non-believer. Or at the very least someone who questions everything that they know to be true. (Boy, do those youth group experiences she references hit home…)
That might feel like a lot of ground to cover in a book. It is the blink of an eye in the grand scheme of what actually happens in this book. I don’t want to give away the plot or what happens, so I’m just going to leave you with this: that life she didn’t get to live? She gets all that and more in the afterlife. A job doing something she loves? Check. A hot demon lover? Check. Amazing friends. Check. A sentient Hobbit House named Carl? Check.
For Whom the Belle Tolls is an incredibly thoughtful work with a lot of heart written by someone who has obviously put in a lot of personal work, but also someone who loves a well-written fantasy novel and a spicy romance novel. It is filled with word play and Dad jokes. It is the book that we all wish we could write. Please consider giving it a try.
