Evocative, poetic prose within a beautiful cover.

Ana Kelly is a solicitor who has an affair with Connor Mooney, one of her clients as a result of circumstantial encounters. Ana herself is professional, detached and understated or at least that is how she presents herself. Underneath that cool exterior, she is insecure and so needing of that love, it becomes for her a destructive force. During the affair, Connor's wife Rebecca was never far from her thoughts. Now Connor is gone however, she reaches out to those who knew him best – one of his friends and also his wife Rebecca. She seems to be looking for peace in her heart because she knows why Connor died which gets revealed little by little until we too, know.

The snapshots of memories and occurrences though brief are revealing of Ana's boxed up grief. It is like she is scared to believe in the love Connor did have for her which is why I found her so compelling as a person.

In summary, it is about love in non ideal circumstances and a reminder of the power of love.

This is definitely a book that will stay with you, and a book that you will sit with for a while.
Following the secret grief of a mistress, this book is angering, heartbreaking, and yet unsettling.
This book is unusual as it is told solely from the point of view of 'the other woman' as she struggles to cope with the loss of her secret lover and also her reflections on their relationship.
The whole book had an unsettled feeling about it, the main character was not likeable but yet you couldn't help but feel for her, especially from the reader's vantage point of being outside and looking in. You will form opinions on their relationship and judge her actions all while she is suffocating under the weight overwhelming grief.
Slowly the details of her life seep out as she expresses her opinions on people in her life, which will undoubtedly be a different opinion to your own.
Overall it was a very good short read that really packs a punch and I already want to read it again.

Here Is The Beehive, Sarah Crossan

Ana and Connor have been having an affair for three years. Hotel rooms and coffee shops, deleted texts and snatched weekends, they have built world for just themselves. Until, one day, the unimaginable happens, Ana finds herself alone, trapped inside her secret. How we lose something the world never knew was ours?

Thanks to #NetGalley for my copy of this remarkable little book.

What a stunning story, one that must play out all over the world without anyone ever realising. Sarah Crossan, in this verse novel, has bled almost a poetry of heartbreak and pain onto these pages.

This exploration of relationships, grief and life after death is honest about how messy these moments are. The rawness of emotion, the rage, hurt, acceptance, the absolute destruction that an affair brings, it all plays out here and does so skilfully.

Though the book is only ever narrated from Anas perspective, the supporting characters are so well written and explored they can be pictured so clearly. There are bombshells that drop slowly through this book, bit by bit as Ana ebbs and flows information about her life.

This was my first Sarah Crossan novel and it absolutely won’t be the last. What a beautiful cover aswell!

Wow. I mean wow.

I really didn't know what to. expect as this was my first Sarah Dessen book but Its been a long while since I devoured a book in one day but I just couldn't stop reading. Without giving spoilers, this book had a trope that I usually really hate, and I didnt like the protaganist at all, but I can still love a book while this is the case. I thought the book was complex and I went through a range of emotions during it. Cant wait to read more from the author!

I wasn't sure how I felt about this book to begin with as Crossan has done a truly excellent job of portraying a complex, flawed and real character, who I didn't actually like. But the more I read, the more compelled I felt to find out how her story would end. In her usual style, Sarah Crossan, expertly uses just a few words to say so much, and to paint a picture of characters so vivid I feel like I know them. But it was a bleak tale, with just a little chink of hope at the end. I didn't connect with it as much as I have done all of her YA verse novels, but still a cracking read which I would heavily recommend, Especially to adults who may not know the author's style.

I have enjoyed Sarah Crossan's childrens' books. I thought Toffee was brilliant. I'm less enamoured with her first adult novel. Not because of the writing, this is beautifully written as always. My problem was that I disliked the two central characters so much. Their selfishness was unbelievable. Ana is a well paid, professional woman. If her marriage was so bad then she could have left, regardless of whether Connor left his wife. The lying and cheating, treating their spouses like idiots just turned my stomach. What amazed me even more was that, until halfway through, I had assumed that Ana didn't have children. I don't know if this was deliberate but it made her seem even more self centred.

I'm not sure if you are meant to feel sympathy for Ana, some reviewers clearly do, but the only ones I felt sorry for were the spouses and children.

I've read all of Sarah Crossan's young adult books and was super excited to get an ARC of her debut adult book. It was a fast read, as Sarah Crossan books always are, and a fantastic character study into our narrator through verse. She was awful and yet relatable, complicated and completely human.

There were horribly hard hitting snippets of insights scattered amongst unrelatably reprehensible behaviour from Ana. She was fascinating in her sheer unlikability, though, somehow.

We start with her lover dying, move onto her obsession with being better than his wife, then it's surprisingly revealed she has a husband herself and then shockingly, that she has her own children that she's never mentioned previously. You can completely believe that this woman's insanely singular focus on Connor would let you think she didn't have a family of her own to consider. It was some fantastic writing to make me feel bad for her and invested in her at any point in the story.

I didn't fully connect with the book though, due to Ana just not giving a shit about anything other than Connor. I felt awful for her kids and husband, and it took me out of the story a little because I kept thinking that if I knew a woman like this in real life I could not have sympathy at all for her.

Here is a story that tells us how it might feel to be ‘the other woman’. This must be every mistresses nightmare - losing the man you love and not being able to show publicly, how you feel. All that time spent together and suddenly it’s over and you have to pick up the pieces....alone. This is what happened to Ana.
I really enjoyed the way this book was written. It told an age old story but it was done with feeling. I could truly sense how unbelieving she was that this had happened to her and how she experienced over and over the age old, if only.
If you’ve been here, this book is for you.

Although this book is written in prose I found it easy to read. You have to concentrate on every word to get the full meaning and understand where the story is going. Because of the writing style I did not get a sense of the characters, although I did dislike the main character Ana. It is the story of a love affair and how it affects each person in the relationship and those around them. I did find the way Ana stalked the wife of her lover a bit creepy though. Not really for me.
Thank you to NetGalley and Bloomsbury Publishing for the ARC of this book.

This is a blooming hard one to review, let me start by saying I love Sarah Crossan as an author and own all of YA books, so when I heard she was going to cross over into adult fiction I was very excited, but when I heard the subject matter my heart dropped a bit.
It is always a risky one to write about an affair, but Crossan has never been one to shy away from emotive subjects, my favourite being Moonrise.
So, on to the book, the subject matter was handled well in my opinion at no point did it feel like it was being romanticised. In fact the characters were all so miserable for various reasons it was the opposite. I mean this was not a happy bunch of people.
We flick back and forth between present and the past when Ana and Connor meet and gradually these two narratives combine.
Ana was a very complex character, not the most likeable, but is this because she was strung along or the situation she put herself in and lets face it at times in this book she is just a little bit unhinged!
The is going to be a divisive novel, it won't be for everyone, there is a lot of swearing, but if you can get past that and the subject then it is very cleverly done as always. The free verse poems put together in such a way that impact the hardest and it is certainly one I will need to read again to pick up all the nuances.

This book is written in an unusual poetic style which I had never experienced before ! 5he book tells of Ana’s emotional state in the aftermath of losing Connor. We also find out how the couple got together and how Ana attempts to befriend Rebecca (Connor’s wife) in order to fill the gaps in her knowledge about Connor’s life. Connor and Ana’s relationship appears to have been very unhealthy, toxic even. Ana was a despicable woman, she was spiteful towards her husband and appeared to largely ignore the needs of her two children. She claimed to love Connor but that relationship seemed to be combative and competitive with Ana dishing out ultimatums for Connor to leave his wife ie Ana had to win him! The author certainly didn’t encourage anyone to cheat on their partner! Nothing really happened in the book and I couldn’t possibly comment on any other characters in the book as the author solely focuses on the dreadful Ana. Thanks to #netgalley for access to the ebook in return for an honest review

I am sorry to say I did not enjoy this book but I did finish it which was not an easy thing to do. I found it travelled backwards and forwards too much for me, finding it difficult to know where I was in the story. The forced relationship Ana forced with Rebecca creepy. Apologies to the author but this was definitely not my sort of book.

Wow, this book is incredible, it draws you in and is impulsive, you literally cannot stop turning the pages! Very cleverly written, indeed.

The story reads as though it's the internal monologue from the main character and it has two different times - before her lover dies and after. The way the two time slips are woven together are fantastic, we end up really getting under the skin of the character and wondering what will happen. When the two time points come together, it's so effective that they blend together seamlessly.

Ana has been having an affair with a married man for three years, when she finds out that he's been killed in an accident and he was the last person to speak to him... Shocked with grief and with no-one to talk to about how she is feeling, Ana begins to implode. She struggles to communicate with her family, begins to fall apart at work and obsessively tries to keep her lover in her life by contacting his wife, his best friend, driving past his house.

Through a special kind of story-telling, we are given an insight into what Ana is going through, her grief is full of depression wishing for sedatives and drugs to take the edge off her pain, anger as she wishes he had left his wife for her, guilt for not having picked up the phone again after they spoke... we go through the whole host of emotions with Ana.

It is an incredible story, I couldn't put the book down and wanted to keep on reading - I did in the end, read it in just two sittings. Highly, highly recommend. My only criticism? I didn't want it to end!

When Ana discovers that her lover Connor has been killed in an accident, she is bereft, but she cannot mourn or show her feelings, because the two of them were married to other people and have been having an illicit affair. Full of passion, snatched moments, breakups and reunions, their relationship is replayed through Ana’s memories, but as she tries to insinuate herself into the life of Connor’s widow, it becomes clear how much of his life she will never know or understand. Crossan’s trademark blank verse makes Ana’s voice seem very immediate and real- the words come straight from her heart, with a searing rawness that brings the story alive. All the pain of the forbidden affair is here. Ana only has a small piece of Conor’s life, yet her love for him causes her to be unkind to her husband, neglectful of her children and to behave morally dubiously at work, ultimately becoming practically crazed with grief and at risk of losing everything. Powerful and authentic.

Thank you to Netgalley and Bloomsbury Publishing Plc (UK & ANZ) for the arc of this book by Sarah Crossan,

This follows a lady named Ana who, in which is married to a gentlemen whom is called Paul and has they have two children, has been having an affair with someone named Connor for three years and secretly meeting him in hotel rooms.... Connor unfortunately dies the hurt she feels is very very real, but he was never truly hers and Ana finds herself trapped with her grief unable to share her thoughts or memories with anyone else due to obviously it was who she had her fling/affair with...

Great captivating book took me a few hours to read!

4 stars

Unfortunately I really struggled with this book. I did like the writing style which is different and fun but I just couldn't get into the story. I couldn't connect with the main character at all. She's going through mourning but I just didn't feel anything for her.

I have read a lot of Sarah Crossan’s YA novels and have to say I think they outshine this book. The style of writing is easy to read and the flow of the verse is ‘nice’. However I couldn’t make myself care about Ana and her ‘grief’. The unfolding story was one of a selfish individual and I would have liked to hear more of Paul & Rebecca. I kept reading hoping it would develop into a story I cared about but alas, no.
Looking forward to Sarah Crossan’s next YA novel.

Told in verse, the story of Ana and Connor is one that was always going to end in someone's heartbreak - either their own or that of Connor's wife, Rebecca. When Connor dies suddenly, Ana is left alone to grieve as the "other woman" and having no-one to confide in or talk about her lost love to. Instead, Ana becomes obsessed with Rebecca, the woman allowed to openly grieve and begins to configure her relationship with Connor while getting to know his wife outside of the things he had told her.

This was a really interesting story to be told in verse, as have been all of the novels I've read by Sarah Crossan. She manages to take different topics and really create lyrical, flowing masterpieces out of them - you wouldn't think words like "fu*k" and "c**t" could work in verse but they do! I think this is also the first adult novel I've read in verse rather than YA so it was a new venture for me in that way.

There were parts of this I really loved - I think the way Ana's character is revealed to the reader between the different parts of the story was so clever. Who I thought Ana was in Part One was a completely different person with a different life than the Ana I knew in Part Five. The same in how we learn about the real Rebecca (also is her name being Rebecca a nod to Daphne Du Maurier? I wonder!) compared to what Ana always thought she was like because of Connor and this awful, terrifying woman she had built her up to be in her head.

The characters in this - mainly Ana and Connor - are not nice people, and because of this I felt no emotional connection to this story the way I felt with other Sarah Crossan books I've read. I didn't really think Ana deserved any kind of happy ever after, and part of me feels like she got off lightly in the end as well.

But an interesting read, and one to pick up if you are a fan of books in verse, and a fan of the unique stories Sarah Crossan writes.

I could not take to this book at all. Unlikeable characters and a format I could not get into. The story of an affair, Interestingly written in poetic prose.

I am a first time reader of Sarah Crossan's work and a work written in the style of verse. It's easy to say that it didn't disappoint me. While the subject matter was not the most cheerful or uplifting, I found the writing was tasteful and touching. I loved getting inside the protagonists mind and reading her thoughts as they unfold. She was an unlikeable person but was written in such a manner as to draw one in and become eager to know more about her and how she would deal with the unpleasant situation she finds herself in.

Personally I would recommend the book and want to thank Netgalley and the publishers for the opportunity to read and give an honest review of the book.