Customer Reviews

The Honey Thief

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The Honey Thief is a lucid and beautiful novel about how the errors of the past haunt the present and how a widowed wife and daughter deal with bottled up feelings. Do secrets affect relationships and every day life? After eleven-year-old Eva is picked up on her fourth shoplifting charge, her mother, Miriam, decides to move from Manhattan to a quiet town in New York State. Lonely, Eva bonds with a middle-aged beekeeper named Burl. But Eva hasn't felt compelled to tell her mother about her new friend. Also, Miriam has never told Eva about her father's death. She told her he died of a heart attack. But is that the truth? The disturbing and heart-wrenching way her father died could affect Eva's future. As tension mounts between mother and daughter, Miriam wonders if she should open up to her daughter. There are some haunting scenes in this book.

The Honey Thief has beautiful language; it has a rather lyrical feel to it. I have fallen in love with this book; there are few novels about family dilemmas that touch me this way. With compelling characters and exquisite language, The Honey Thief is as sweet and as rich as, well, honey. I highly recommend this title.

The book was well written, drawing the reader into the inner lives of its complex and endearing characters. The story captured the essence of how the forgotten losses of early childhood can create a lonliness and un-named longing as the years go by. Graver's portrayal of the mother/daughter relationship rings rich and true. The only 'fault' in the story, was that Graver seemed to 'sell us short' at the ending....I think she could have gone a bit further toward resolution of some of the issues. Mind you, I wouldn't like a neat and tidy ending, but this one was a bit too ambiguous. But graver's writing makes up for any shortcomings at the end. I enjoyed every page...just wish there were more of them!

I found this novel completely engrossing and incredibly moving. The story of Eva and the effect her past has on her present seemed so real to me. The characters are all trying so hard to manage their lives but have all kinds of human frailties. And I loved all the details about bees and beekeeping, which add a whole other layer to the book. As someone in the mental health profession, I also thought the depiction of mental illness and its effect on families was both accurate and wrenching. All-told,this is one of the best novels I've read in the last few years.

Best line in the book: "Again the thunder clapped. Still Eva stood in the field. Maybe, she thought, a girl struck by lightning would split down the middle and become two girls, and then she'd have a friend."

I had to take a breath after that one--very powerful image. The longing Eva feels to fill a void, to have a friend to assuage her grief is palpable.Yet, one can sympathize with Miriam's frustration over trying so hard to make ends meet and meet Eva's needs while balancing the child's "itchy palms" wanting to steal things to fulfill some missing ingredient with her own attempts at a life. The intertwining of the mother and the daughter is done beautifully by Graver. In a summer when honey seemed to be the main topic (Secret Life of Bees) I was inundated with the symbolism of the bees and their hives and their honey. I just happened upon the books back-to-back. Both were great but as a whole, I was more moved and entranced by Graver's work.

...it will manifest itself differently for every person who experiences it. In the case of young Eva - Elizabeth Graver's engagingly and vividly drawn heroine - the manifestations include a love/hate/fear-of-loss relationship with her mother Miriam, general adolescent frustration and mistrust of the world in general, and shoplifting. All of Graver's characters in this wonderful novel are well-drawn and emotionally full - and making them even more believable and compelling is the fact that all of them are very far from perfect.

As if simply passing into adolescence from childhood isn't difficult enough, Eva is coping with the fact that her dad - whom she remembers as the perfect father, but only in briefly-imaged wisps of memory - died when she was only six. Her mother has told her from the time of his death that he suffered a heart attack - which is one of those amazingly widespread half-lies with which we as human beings become all too familiar as we pass through this life. Eva accepts the story on the surface - but something within her tells her that there is more here than is being revealed to her.

Eva and her mother live in New York City at the beginning of the story - a single mom striving valiantly to raise a daughter in a less-than-ideal environment. Her mom's best friend is an Indian woman named Ratha who lives in the apartment on the floor below - and Ratha and Mahesh's daughter Charu is Eva's closest pal. As Eva begins to approach adolescence, she begins to evince troubling behavior - the shoplifting mentioned above, plus a tendency to argue more and more aggressively with Miriam. After several episodes of being caught stealing, Miriam is at her wits' end - and the decision is made that a change of environment might be the best thing for both of them. Pouring over an atlas one evening, they settle on the Finger Lakes area of upstate New York - and they pull up what roots they have acquired and make the move.

Eva is bored stiff living in the country. She knows no other children her age, and the woman hired by her mom to baby-sit her (the fact of which angers Eva even further) is more inclined to sit in a chair and snore the afternoon away than to spend any quality time with her young charge. Eva begins to explore the area on a second-hand bike that her mom buys for her - and she makes an interesting discovery. Cycling down a dusty country road one day, she comes across a card table set up with several jaws of honey - along with a home-made sign indicating a price, and a small lockbox with a slot for payment. Tempted to steal the honey, she holds back at first - then her curiosity gets the better of her, and she sneaks onto the property behind the card table, and discovers a row of beehives.

Eva soon meets Burl, the owner of the property and the hives - one of the gentlest (if flawed - he IS human, after all) characters I've run across in some time. Burl is annoyed at first that his privacy has been breached - but he soon warms to this strange, strong-willed young girl. He senses something about her - he senses her pain, he senses her strength, and he senses her need for a friend.

The unlikely and uncommon friendship that develops between these two is both poignant and sweet - it reminds me a bit of the friendship between young Clara Winter and Georg Kominsky in Alison McGhee's unforgettable novel SHADOW BABY. It's a completely believable, generation-spanning bond that they share - and it's a joy to behold.

Through the course of THE HONEY THIEF, Elizabeth Graver leads the reader through the trials, sorrows and joys of these characters' lives - and down the sometimes rough road of memory. She does so with grace, and with a total respect for these characters - and she shows an understanding for the human spirit, and the pain it can endure, that will touch the readers' hearts.

The Honey Thief is a contemporary novel about a woman who must face her past before she can help her daughter.

Eleven year old Eva is picked up for shop lifting, Eva's 4th offence, the judge warns her that next time she will go to a detention center. Miriam, Eva's mother is at her wits end. Miriam decides it would be better if they moved out of Manhattan to up state New York. They decided together where they would move. They picked a small town where both mother and daughter could get a fresh start. Life is simple and slow, a little to slow for Eva's taste. Eva fights her desire to shop lift most of the time, the urge is so strong. Miriam decides to buy Eva a used bike so she can explore the town and meet new friends. All through this Miriam has a secret of her own that she will not, cannot tell any one not even her own daughter. Than Eva meets a nice older man named Burl who helps Eva get grounded. They experience mother-daughter relationship that goes through troubling times and Burl helps them through it.

It's interesting to watch how two people who are physically put together can be so emotionally far apart. It's real life, and like real life sometimes it takes a stranger to bring them together. The path they take makes for an interesting read, it may seems slow at times, but stick with it, it's worth it.

I felt that this book was just alright, I would like to give this book a 2 1/2. Nothing really awful to saw about it, yet nothing really great to say about it either. When the plot of a novel is slow (like this one), I expect greater character development and emotions. Instead I just felt passive towards all the characters.

I did not understand Burl's role in this book. Was he supposed to bring them (mother-daughter) closer together, help Eva with her stealing, teach her life lessons or what? I kept expecting Burl and Miriam to get together or at least become close friends, but that never happens. And the end, it just ends--no real conclusions, not even a direction.

I think I would have liked this book more if it focused more on the relationship between Eva and Miriam and Eva and Burl. Instead there are a lot of flashbacks with Burl and his parents and his love Alice. And then Miriam's flashbacks all involve Francis. While I thought these flashbacks, especially with Francis, were interesting, I felt the novel spent too much time in the past, and too little in the present and future. For example, the "tensions" between Eva and Miriam are only really talked about in one scene, when Miriam is on her way to work and they get into a huge argument.

Elizabeth Graver, The Honey Thief (Hyperion, 1999)

There is quite a difference between the novel where nothing happens at all and the minimal novel, where small things happen, but due to the lack of bigger things happening around them, the small things take on a significance they would not otherwise normally have. There are far too many examples of the former type to list; Elizabeth Graver's fine novel The Honey Thief is an excellent example of the latter.

Sick of New York City, widowed paralegal Miriam Baruch takes her eleven-year-old daughter Eva out to Finger Lakes country for a bit of rest, relaxation, and rehab; Eva has developed a rather nasty habit of stealing things. Eva develops a relationship with a local beekeeper (that her mother doesn't know about) while her mother is off developing relationships of her own. As the book unfolds, we alternate scenes of present-day life for Eva with her mother's recollections about the decline and untimely death of Eva's father.

Despite the way it sounds, this doesn't set off the dysfunctional-family-novel alarm bells. Being a single parent having trouble coping doesn't necessarily put you into dysfunction territory (far more dysfunctional are those novels where a couple of idiots stay together "for the kids" and end up doing said kids more harm than good; I don't think I need to provide examples here, you've all read a few, no doubt). I'd hate to think readers were feeling reluctant to pick this up because it smacks of the Oprahesque. At its heart, it's a novel about just getting along in life. Questions aren't answered, loose ends abound, people are just plain messy, and the whole thing feels perfectly natural.

You'd think that in the thirty years since the slice-of-life novel came into vogue, it would have gotten boring. Thankfully, this is not the case. There are far more than eight million stories in the naked city, and some of them are told by writers as good as Graver. May their numbers increase. ****

It took me awhile to get into this book having just finished Elizabeth Berg's wonderful "The Year of Pleasures" and Susan Miller's "Lost in the Forest." The story grew on me slowly, though, and I wound up not being able to put it down one Sunday until I finished it. I really came to like all of the characters and felt somewhat disappointed that their lives didn't turn out at all as I would have liked. It's books like this (and the other two) that make me wish for sequels with definitive endings. Good lazy afternoon reading!

This is the third novel I've read by Elizabeth Graver.
I think she's an excellent writer and her first novel Unravelling is
a favorite of mine.

The Honey Thief is about 11 year old Eva and her mother Miriam, who move from New York City to the country side of upstate New York. Eva had been caught shoplifting in the city and Miriam thinks a change in geography will do her some good. Eva isn't exactly happy about their new location, it's summer and she's bored and the only new friend she's made is the lonely bee keeper Burl, who lives by himself on his family farm.

Eva, Miriam and Burl narrate this story in alternating chapters. I thought the characters were very well wrought and realistic. Elizabeth Graver does a lovely job describing feelings and thoughts that we don't often articulate to others for example; when Burl describes feeling connected to bee keepers of long ago, when Miriam and Eva feel connected as they are getting dressed to go to dinner, when Eva describes her memories of her now dead father.

There is certainly a tension in this story that keeps the pages turning. I was especially interested in the history surrounding Eva's father. And I thought Graver described his situation very realistically. But I also felt that the story didn't come together in the end. I also didn't understand why Graver included the embarrassing incident between Burl and Eva. I don't understand what purpose it served and that issue also felt unresolved.

Overall I did not find this to be a satisfying read.
I thought the writing was very good but the story was lacking.
I would however strongly recommend reading Elizabeth Graver's
first novel Unravelling. I thought that was a wonderful work of fiction.