A review by fairpersephone
Honeycomb by Joanne M. Harris

3.0

Harris' Honeycomb may appear, at first glance, to be a collection of one hundred unrelated tales — but in reality, most of these short stories of faerie folk and princesses and gardeners are interwoven, so that characters from one little vignette will show up again a while later. This book shines when it's taking us through the life of the Lacewing King, king of the faerie folk, and does several other stories well (particularly the one about the gardener, the dancer, or the woman with red shoes), but some, like the morality tales where common farmyard animals stand in for political events and schools of thought, I found rather slow and skim-worthy. Even so, it's a lush, imaginative piece of work with illustrations that make you feel like you're reading a traditional volume of fairy tales like that of Andersen or the Brothers Grimm.