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THE HONEY FARM

Name: THE HONEY FARM
Author: Harriet Alida Lye
ISBN: 978-1-63149-434-5

by Harriet Alida Lye ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 29, 2018

A honey-mouthed debut ruminating on creation, possession, and faith.

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Two young artists grapple with love, purpose, and identity in a paradise turned sinister.

In Lye’s debut novel, a once-prosperous, now-troubled farm—known as The Honey Farm—is beset by problems of biblical proportions: frog-filled lakes, lice infestations, and diseased livestock. In an effort to save her land of milk and honey, the farm’s enigmatic owner, Cynthia, and her assistant, Hartford, offer the property as an artist’s retreat in exchange for manual labor. The summer brings together a group of artists including Silvia, a recent college graduate fleeing her religious family, and Ibrahim, an artist for whom “nothing exists...until he paints it.” As the two grow closer, they slowly learn about Cynthia’s past—and begin to see glimpses of a looming danger. For every intricate description of a delicate honeycomb, there’s a worrisome image like hundreds of dead bees. The good exists among the bad; the light balances the dark. Short chapters, which shift between Silvia's and Ibrahim’s points of view, help build suspense. As the book races to its close, the secrets beneath the surface begin to buzz as loudly as a bees nest. For a psychological thriller, the novel sometimes shows its hand too much, making the characters seem naïve or willfully ignorant. Despite this, there’s a lot that’s done right: the use of biblical verses and stories; the meticulous rendering of the farm; the unsettling tone woven throughout. Most important is Lye’s lush, poetic prose, which soars off the page: “the earth soaks up water like someone thirsty for love,” and “the world breaks and heals itself again, eternally.” Each lyrical line feels like a gift left at the reader’s altar.

A honey-mouthed debut ruminating on creation, possession, and faith.

Pub Date: May 29, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-63149-434-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Liveright/Norton

Review Posted Online: March 4, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.

The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

Pub Date: March 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.