Scan barcode
A review by keysersuze
Here Is the Beehive by Sarah Crossan
4.0
Ana’s life implodes when the widow of her lover comes to her office to ask her to help with the will.
Told from her point of view, she reels between current events and the before and during of their affair, sparked by a meeting in her office and carried on, pursued by them both as they recognise something in each other that they can’t find in their public lives.
Ana’s not a likeable person. She is envious of basically everyone and everything, she lies, forgets her niece’s birthday and spends the majority of the novel justifying their affair by reasoning that his wife was clearly a terrible human being who just didn’t understand him.
Somehow, Sarah Crossan’s writing brings Ana’s humanity to the forefront – the reader sympathises while recognising that the Wife may not actually be as terrible as he made out to be.
A slim novel of just over 200 pages, and with a prose poetry hybrid on the pages, this isn’t a long read. That’s not to say it’s not complex though, and on more than one occasion I got the feeling that we were peeling back layers of revelations with each page. None of these I’ll tell you now, of course – part of the impact is the deadweight of another reveal, something else to add to the narrative which fleshes out the characters into real people, with relatable bad decisions and broken dreams.
Not the most upbeat of stories and actually, not really much optimism in there but something in the way that their affair, the connection between two humans, is so well described it doesn’t feel like relentless doom and gloom.
You might be familiar with Crossan as a YA author – perhaps her most well known is the Breathe series, or maybe The Weight of Water. I enjoyed the window into another world, and look forward to reading something with her unique voice again soon.
Thanks to Netgalley and Bloomsbury Circus for the ARC!
Told from her point of view, she reels between current events and the before and during of their affair, sparked by a meeting in her office and carried on, pursued by them both as they recognise something in each other that they can’t find in their public lives.
Ana’s not a likeable person. She is envious of basically everyone and everything, she lies, forgets her niece’s birthday and spends the majority of the novel justifying their affair by reasoning that his wife was clearly a terrible human being who just didn’t understand him.
Somehow, Sarah Crossan’s writing brings Ana’s humanity to the forefront – the reader sympathises while recognising that the Wife may not actually be as terrible as he made out to be.
A slim novel of just over 200 pages, and with a prose poetry hybrid on the pages, this isn’t a long read. That’s not to say it’s not complex though, and on more than one occasion I got the feeling that we were peeling back layers of revelations with each page. None of these I’ll tell you now, of course – part of the impact is the deadweight of another reveal, something else to add to the narrative which fleshes out the characters into real people, with relatable bad decisions and broken dreams.
Not the most upbeat of stories and actually, not really much optimism in there but something in the way that their affair, the connection between two humans, is so well described it doesn’t feel like relentless doom and gloom.
You might be familiar with Crossan as a YA author – perhaps her most well known is the Breathe series, or maybe The Weight of Water. I enjoyed the window into another world, and look forward to reading something with her unique voice again soon.
Thanks to Netgalley and Bloomsbury Circus for the ARC!