The honey farm A novel

Harriet Alida Lye

eAudio - 2018

The drought has discontented the bees. Soil dries into sand; honeycomb stiffens into wax. But Cynthia knows how to breathe life back into her farm: offer it as an artists' colony with free room, board, and "life experience" in exchange for backbreaking labor. Silvia, a wide-eyed graduate and would-be poet, and Ibrahim, a painter distracted by constant inspiration, are drawn to Cynthia's offer, and soon, to each other. But something lies beneath the surface. The Edenic farm is plagued by events that strike Silvia as ominous: taps run red, scalps itch with lice, frogs swarm the pond. One by one, the other residents leave. As summer tenses into autumn, Cynthia's shadowed past is revealed and Silvia becomes increasingly... paralyzed by doubt. Building to a shocking conclusion, The Honey Farm announces the arrival of a bold new voice and offers a thrilling portrait of creation and possession in the natural world.

Saved in:
Subjects
Published
[United States] : HighBridge 2018.
Language
English
Corporate Author
hoopla digital
Main Author
Harriet Alida Lye (author)
Corporate Author
hoopla digital (-)
Other Authors
Amy Landon (narrator)
Edition
Unabridged
Online Access
Instantly available on hoopla.
Cover image
Physical Description
1 online resource (1 audio file (11hr., 13 min.)) : digital
Format
Mode of access: World Wide Web.
ISBN
9781684412914
Access
AVAILABLE FOR USE ONLY BY IOWA CITY AND RESIDENTS OF THE CONTRACTING GOVERNMENTS OF JOHNSON COUNTY, UNIVERSITY HEIGHTS, HILLS, AND LONE TREE (IA).
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

bees are weird. The peculiar mating rituals, the doomed drones who wait all their lives for a single sexual encounter with an omnipotent queen, leading to immediate death. As humans, we find them fascinating: perhaps the only species whose gender politics are more screwed up than our own. In "The Honey Farm," the debut novel by the Canadian writer Harriet Alida Lye, the inner workings of a bee colony become an eerie metaphor for communal living gone awry. At the center of the novel is Silvia, a recent university graduate who replies to an exuberant online ad for "THE HONEY FARM. Free retreat for artists, writers, thinkers! " It's unclear which category Silvia belongs to, but she is nonetheless offered room and board in exchange for work on the farm. It seems, at first, an idyllic setting: Think Yaddo with bees. Running the show is the mysterious Cynthia, the farm's proprietor and queen bee, who supervises the chores that occupy most of the day. The residents - two brothers who make documentary films, a French Canadian artist couple and Ibrahim, a driven young painter from Toronto, among others - are shocked to find that the farm has no internet access, no cellphone signal. Its only link to the outside world is a phone booth at the end of the lane. It's a satisfying setup, reminiscent of an Agatha Christie mystery, the entire cast of characters marooned together in an exotic locale. Strange events ensue. Silvia drinks from a garden hose and finds the water blood-colored. The group is afflicted with head lice. A swim in a murky pond disturbs an unimaginable number of frogs, which soon infiltrate the house. The incidents seem related to an unprecedented drought that's making the bees anxious. Clearly, evil is afoot. The writing is uneven, but Lye is at her best when describing the natural world. "By the end of June, the fuzzy-headed clover will have finished its season," she writes. "The bees will have sucked the purple straws dry." Her fascination with apian life and the little-known techniques of beekeeping give rise to the most memorable scenes in the novel, as when Silvia learns to harvest royal jelly from the hive. Raised in a conservative Christian home, Silvia seems younger than her years. Her innocence is believable, but her passivity is narratively problematic. She is a character to whom life simply happens. She drifts into a love affair with Ibrahim and feels guilty about not telling her parents. She sleeps a great deal and has cryptic dreams. The story gathers momentum when, to her utter astonishment, she finds herself pregnant - a fact she discovers only when a clerk in a grocery store inexplicably hands her a pregnancy test she doesn't ask or pay for. Ever obedient, Silvia finds a restroom and pees on the stick. The story takes a dark turn when Cynthia shows a disturbing interest in Silvia's unborn baby, building to a climax that should be harrowing, but isn't, since Silvia lacks the drive to save herself or even understand the nature of the danger she's in. When it comes to creating suspense, "The Honey Farm" succeeds almost too well. The unexplained phenomena of early summer, so vividly rendered, in the end amount to nothing. The drought eases, the bloody water clears and the frogs are gone as quickly as they appeared. In the end, the novel doesn't deliver on its sinister promise. "It starts with the bees," the spooky prologue tells us, "and it'll end this way too." If only that were true. ? JENNIFER HAIGH is the author, most recently, of "Heat and Light."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 8, 2018]