Reviews

Honey Mine: Collected Stories by Camille Roy

cecilehueb's review

challenging funny tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

?? Duurde meer dan een jaar om t uit te lezen. Sommige verhalen las ik 3x, smullend van de taal en karakters en queerness, andere waren te dense in taal om te lezen (ik zag door de woorden het verhaal niet meer)

eternalfig's review

emotional inspiring reflective slow-paced

5.0

blschuldt's review against another edition

challenging reflective slow-paced

3.25

I didn’t NOT enjoy myself reading this, but not sure this one is for us dummies. I think I need things spelled out a lil more; the beautiful afterword was my favorite part.

bmaeus's review

challenging emotional funny mysterious reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? N/A
• Strong character development? N/A
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

4.75

a beautiful & difficult collection. i think it needs to be reread again and again, like poetry. i can't imagine reading this as a non-lesbian; not to say it wouldn't be valuable, but the whole work is absolutely effervescent with lesbianism. roy plays with language like it's a pool of water. she plays with narrative & truth like it's a stranger she saw once on a subway. stunning. funny. so cool. an inspiration to lesbians & experimental writers everywhere.

ellachase's review

adventurous challenging informative reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? N/A
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

courtneycarmona's review

challenging emotional mysterious tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? N/A
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.25

honeychain's review

challenging reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character

3.75

xoskelet's review

funny reflective fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

firstiteration's review

challenging emotional reflective medium-paced

4.0

Honey Mine is more than it seems. I knew nothing about Camille Roy or her work when I first opened the book; I was merely interested in reading some lesbian writing, and also liked the cover.

What appears to be a book of short stories is actually as category-bending as the quotations on the back claim. Most stories seem to have the same narrator, who is named Camille just like the author. But the details of her life change and distort with each story. With each new section of Honey Mine, I felt like I was reading a novel, a memoir, a literary experiment, a short story, a literary analysis, a cultural history. Some chapters become the subject of discussion in later ones. Camille is a character, a narrator, an author, blurring the boundaries between these things in a way I don’t often see them blurred. It’s fascinating.

In a way, Honey Mine is a breath of fresh air because it engages with the idea of representation with intelligence and nuance. Unlike the time Roy grew up in, and even my recent teenage years, books by, about, or including lesbians are easier to come by (though they aren’t the mainstream). There has been a big push around books that represent and include - but as a lesbian, am I able to connect to them? Do I benefit from them? Again, as a lesbian specifically, do I even want a kind of representation that is sanitized, that tries to translate our experience into something a non-lesbian audience will never live, because it is a language they will never speak? And what about when I am reading books that centre around lives and experiences that I will never have - what am I expecting and what is that reading experience? It’s given me a fair amount to think about.

Even though as a younger lesbian in a different time and place, I have never had the exact experiences Roy has, on a personal level I really enjoyed Honey Mine as a glimpse into what I consider "my" history. It's a history that lesbians before me created, and a history I find myself constantly searching for because otherwise, I'll never encounter it. This sentiment made reading Roy's Afterword especially meaningful, for me. I can't imagine what it's like to feel like you're being told your era, your version of being a lesbian is over, has been obscured or replaced even as you continue to live. It makes me want to reach out to Roy and say that her writing resonated with me and my life strongly, even in my different time and place, and that there are others like me. We are here and we want to listen.

The best books give me something to chew on, and Honey Mine has absolutely done that. Even though there were stories I didn’t exactly enjoy when I was in the middle of reading them, I gained new insights into them as I progressed through later sections. It’s a book I’m hoping to return to again in the future, maybe after reading some of the other authors Roy mentions in the book. 

gabiwelsh's review

medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? N/A
• Diverse cast of characters? N/A

3.5

Ok I’m obsessed with Camille Roy, I think she’s a gem and we’re incredibly lucky to have her and others in the new narrative wave of poets and writers. I was very excited about this collection!! There were several stories and essays I hadn’t read before but I found myself knowing several of them, just from their inclusion in anthologies and web platforms (she writes for sf moma or at least, did), so it wasn’t a loss by any means. I did find myself trudging through a lot of the stories and mostly the essays!!! like, am I dumb, or high, or am I just simply not following? So much of her work is focused on the subject / subjectivity and what that looks like when merged with fiction. What memory means and how to “accurately”  write a memory when that process is a) maybe impossible b) dragged down by subjectivity c) privy to the ways memories merge, muddle, fall apart, etc… there was a very lovely essay specifically  about this I cannot remember the title (and I’m on a walk to get Dunkin’ so I cannot check/cite). Find it yourself. The afterword was somewhat devastating - to defend her late partner, to defend the subjecthood of lesbians, to defend herself saying , ok this loss of my partner has devastated me so much I’m not going to recover from it and maybe not write. Like fuck! Of course I’m grateful this anthology exists but really the afterword read partly like she wrote it cumbersomely (is that a word?). The annoyance of deadlines. If anything, has me thinking about how sacred all relationships are, and even defending the act of aging (me??? hopeful at the idea of getting old???). I hope she didn’t feel a pressure to write for those she needed to argue with - the new generation of queers I can imagine (and have seen) that many lesbian elders seem to feel at odds with, for various reasons: the continued desolation of lesbian spaces, the “expansion” (or, opening of language) of gender identities, the strange acceptance and capitalization of queer-ish culture. Probably seems dooming to an old lesbian, fair enough. I just hope she wasn’t writing in defense, and instead writing to show us (the baby gays) both a history of and a way of writing/feeling/loving alongside our gay families.