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le13anna's review
3.0
I loved the slow pace of this book. The way when reading it i felt sun drenched and full of angst stuck in the country as a teenager...pulling against all that wide empty space around me.....
debnanceatreaderbuzz's review
3.0
A mom and her daughter
move to the country to
avert the troubled path
the daughter has begun
to travel. There, the
daughter is befriended by
a beekeeper. Some disconcerting
and seemingly unnecessary scenes.
move to the country to
avert the troubled path
the daughter has begun
to travel. There, the
daughter is befriended by
a beekeeper. Some disconcerting
and seemingly unnecessary scenes.
xterminal's review
4.0
Elizabeth Graver, The Honey Thief (Hyperion, 1999)
There is quite a difference between the novel where nothing happens at all and the minimal novel, where small things happen, but due to the lack of bigger things happening around them, the small things take on a significance they would not otherwise normally have. There are far too many examples of the former type to list; Elizabeth Graver's fine novel The Honey Thief is an excellent example of the latter.
Sick of New York City, widowed paralegal Miriam Baruch takes her eleven-year-old daughter Eva out to Finger Lakes country for a bit of rest, relaxation, and rehab; Eva has developed a rather nasty habit of stealing things. Eva develops a relationship with a local beekeeper (that her mother doesn't know about) while her mother is off developing relationships of her own. As the book unfolds, we alternate scenes of present-day life for Eva with her mother's recollections about the decline and untimely death of Eva's father.
Despite the way it sounds, this doesn't set off the dysfunctional-family-novel alarm bells. Being a single parent having trouble coping doesn't necessarily put you into dysfunction territory (far more dysfunctional are those novels where a couple of idiots stay together "for the kids" and end up doing said kids more harm than good; I don't think I need to provide examples here, you've all read a few, no doubt). I'd hate to think readers were feeling reluctant to pick this up because it smacks of the Oprahesque. At its heart, it's a novel about just getting along in life. Questions aren't answered, loose ends abound, people are just plain messy, and the whole thing feels perfectly natural.
You'd think that in the thirty years since the slice-of-life novel came into vogue, it would have gotten boring. Thankfully, this is not the case. There are far more than eight million stories in the naked city, and some of them are told by writers as good as Graver. May their numbers increase. ****
There is quite a difference between the novel where nothing happens at all and the minimal novel, where small things happen, but due to the lack of bigger things happening around them, the small things take on a significance they would not otherwise normally have. There are far too many examples of the former type to list; Elizabeth Graver's fine novel The Honey Thief is an excellent example of the latter.
Sick of New York City, widowed paralegal Miriam Baruch takes her eleven-year-old daughter Eva out to Finger Lakes country for a bit of rest, relaxation, and rehab; Eva has developed a rather nasty habit of stealing things. Eva develops a relationship with a local beekeeper (that her mother doesn't know about) while her mother is off developing relationships of her own. As the book unfolds, we alternate scenes of present-day life for Eva with her mother's recollections about the decline and untimely death of Eva's father.
Despite the way it sounds, this doesn't set off the dysfunctional-family-novel alarm bells. Being a single parent having trouble coping doesn't necessarily put you into dysfunction territory (far more dysfunctional are those novels where a couple of idiots stay together "for the kids" and end up doing said kids more harm than good; I don't think I need to provide examples here, you've all read a few, no doubt). I'd hate to think readers were feeling reluctant to pick this up because it smacks of the Oprahesque. At its heart, it's a novel about just getting along in life. Questions aren't answered, loose ends abound, people are just plain messy, and the whole thing feels perfectly natural.
You'd think that in the thirty years since the slice-of-life novel came into vogue, it would have gotten boring. Thankfully, this is not the case. There are far more than eight million stories in the naked city, and some of them are told by writers as good as Graver. May their numbers increase. ****
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