I read this book over two nights and was transported to a whole new world and a whole new meaning of novel writing. Sarah Crossan has such a unique style that draws you right in. The story is written in verse and is beautifully done. So much so, that you forget you are reading verse. Whether you are a poetry fan or not, this story is brilliant and should be read.

The story revolves around Ana and dips in and out between past and present in short scenes that say so much in so few words. The emotional impact of the writing is stunning and I felt every bit of Ana's grief and I watched her world tumble and fall apart around her as she struggled to make sense of something she could never share.

This is a powerful story of love, loss, betrayal, and grief. The book is so well written and the style is addictive. I found myself saying just one more scene, one more page until my eyes closed and refused to allow me to continue. The pace of the story is perfect and I have no doubt that Sarah Crossan's first entry into adult literary fiction is going to be raved about and hit all the bestseller lists.

I’ve read nearly everything Sarah Crossan has written and this is the first book I’ve read of hers that is aimed at an adult audience. As usual, the writing is lovely - she is such a talented author. However, the plot was all about a married woman who was having an affair with a married man, and it was all about miserable marriages and toxic dinner parties. Totally not my kind of subject matter.

The writing was five stars; the content was one star. Averages out at three stars, so still an ok book, but not one I’ll go back to.

I have previously read two of Sarah Crossans books and liked them, unfortunately I can't say the same about this one. I'm not really a big fan of romance books and requested it because it was an author I'd read before. I couldn't read it and didn't like from the off!

Sadly, this is the first Sarah Crossan book I have not enjoyed. It is the first adult book written by her that I have read.
I started by having some sympathy with the narrator but it did not take me long to start to feel uncomfortable with that sympathy. Yes, she was the Mistress, so she could not be seen to be grieving. She did not exist.
Having said this, I do think that the author is very clever with the drip feeding of information about the narrator (I am not sure that we ever learn her name). There does seem to be an interesting twist at the end but I had already fallen out of love with the book and did not properly finish it..

SARAH CROSSAN– HERE IS THE BEEHIVE

I read this novel in advance of publication through NetGalley in return for an honest review.

Two confessions. Firstly, before reading this novel I had never heard of Ms Crossan. Secondly, I loathe poetry, as I simply don’t have the patience to understand it – my loss, I know.

“Here is the Beehive” is a novel written in poetry form. Not prose. Sometimes sentences are two words long, aligned to the left, sometimes to the right, sometimes some words of a paragraph indented within it for (to me) no particular reason.

The opening:


The only way
out
now
is to stay busy,
so I have borrowed
Anna Karenina
from my mother and will not
allow myself to cry
until I have read it.

Twice.


Third confession.
I nearly
gave up.
Then I realised that as there were so few words
on each page,
I was storming through it.
And
that I was
enjoying it.

Sarah Crossan is a brilliant writer. She must be, to engage someone like myself. Some of the images she creates with so few words are excellent. So though it took me some while to get into it, and work out who the characters were, I can only offer five stars. To give fewer would be churlish.

Here is the Beehive is Sarah Crossan's first foray into adult literature, and it is a strong showing. As with her young adult books it is written in free verse, which some readers might find off putting , but the writing is so strong and flows so smoothly that you soon forget the form and find yourself completely immersed in this woman's story.
Here is the Beehive is a book about love and loss, and since it is written from the unusual perspective of the "other woman" it also touches on the theme of guilt.
Ana is a solicitor who embarks on an enduring affair with a married client, Conner, while slowly withdrawing from her own marriage. When he dies suddenly she is overwhelmed by grief, but it is a grief that she must keep secret, not just from her husband and children, but even from friends and work colleagues. Throughout the book we travel between the current day and the past, and so we get to see the development of the affair, the stopping when the guilt got too much and restarting when they could no longer resist. As Conner's solicitor and executioner of his will she is forced to deal with his wife, and with grief twisting her mind she tries to develop a sort of twisted relationship with the widow.
Crossan's real skill is her ability to convey so much in a few short sentences , once you pick up the book, it becomes difficult to put it down again, you are caught up in the emotion that she writes so powerfully. As a character Ana is not always likeable, in fact at times she is downright unpleasant, but it is hard not to feel an empathy for her loss and her feelings of isolation and regret.
I read and reviewed an ARC courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher, all opinions are my own.

I've loved all of Sarah's YA free verse novels, so was beyond excited about her adult debut. I was not disappointed at all. It's the story of an affair told after it's ending, when Ana is now alone with her secrets and her guilt. The extraordinary thing about this story is it should be a familiar one, the tale of the other woman is a long use trope. However Sarah tells it in a way that feels new and previously untold, the story of a woman who build a world with a man she loved and is now trapped under the rubble of it's collapse. How we feel about Ana changes throughout reading, as we are intermittently drip-feed information that constantly reshapes what we thought we knew or felt. I've not read an account of grief quite like this one, so powerful and haunting in its quiet rage. Phenomenal.

Ana is a lawyer who has an affair with a client. Connor suddenly dies and Ana is bereft. She finds a way of keeping her lover's memory alive by appointing herself executor to his will and befriending Rebecca, Connor's wife. All the while, she is thinking about whether Connor loved her more than his wife. She is neurotic, obsessed, can't let go or move forward.

The book felt unsettling, mainly because it was impossible to warm to Ana. She came across as needy and self-pitying, always wanting someone else to blame. It took a long time to discover she had children. The narrative was all about her and the lover, and Ana's husband who believed her when she supposedly worked late or went to a conference that was really a hotel where she was cheating on him.

Sarah Crossan writes in a way that engages you, flipping between the present day and the affair. There wasn't a point at which I wanted to stop reading, despite the direct and at times uncompromising narrative style.

Even so, I found it hard to connect with the story at times. There wasn't one character who was being honest, apart from the children. Everyone was hiding something. I got the impression that making readers uncomfortable was deliberate on the author's part.

I didn't feel that sorry for Ana. She used people, including her husband, and expected everything to revolve around her. When it didn't, she got childish. The way she inveigled herself into Rebecca's life felt creepy. She needed to get help but remained in self-denial.

Sarah Crossan skilfully depicts how obsessive love can make one person's life disintegrate in front of and around them whilst they desperately clutch at every object or memory that keeps the past alive, as though this will make everything okay in the end.

The story tackles a difficult and emotive subject and will provoke a lot of discussion about morality and our perceptions of it.

I was sent an advance review copy of this book by Bloomsbury Publishing, in return for an honest appraisal.

Here is the Beehive was a love-hate experience. I love Crossan. Here is the Beehive is her first adult book (graphic content!) and I couldn't shake off the feeling that I was in a tumble drier with sharp objects. The grief and obsession were suffocatingly painful and so well conveyed. It wasn't until days after I'd finished reading it that I thought, well of course - beehive!
I'd read other reviews that viewed Ana as a good character who did bad things. I never completely warmed to her. I felt for her but I really felt for her husband. I'd recently picked up and began reading Blood Orange, which had a similarly toxic theme - and years ago, Julie Meyerson's, Sleepwalking. Each of these books were compelling and deeply uncomfortable which shows how strong the writing is. I didn't love reading it but love the art form and rawness.

We meet Ana, a solicitor, as she finds out that the man with whom she has been having an affair for three years has passed away. What follows is her struggle in accepting both the fact that he is gone and that their affair didn’t end in the way she wanted – with Connor leaving his wife for her. We also have flashbacks of their time together, allowing us to get to know Connor and therefore better appreciate what he meant to Ana and how she ends up in the situation she finds herself in.

This book isn’t really like anything I have read before… but I’m not sure whether that is a compliment. The author has written the story in verse, which irritated me at first but eventually became less grating as I could see how well it represented Ana’s fragmented thought process. More than that, though, I found the story really rather repetitive; a continuous cycle of the present day – “I’m sad you’re gone” – and the flashbacks – “I’m angry you haven’t left your wife yet”.

I also found Ana to be pretty repugnant. Certainly, I wasn’t expecting a saint when I started reading about someone who’d had an affair for three years, but there was nothing nuanced in Ana’s character that enabled me to sympathise with her in any way. In fact, many of the characters were unpleasant, leaving me rather cold to the story as a whole.

I can see why others might appreciate this book, but it wasn’t an enjoyable read for me I’m afraid.

2.5 stars, rounded up to 3.

My thanks to the author, NetGalley, and the publisher for the arc to review.

I guess the thing is that there's nothing new to be said about an obsessive adulterous affair where both partners are married... The style is supposed to be in verse but really it's just sentences randomly broken up without any metre or rhythm:

'Rebecca was calling because she knew
and I needed a story to explain it.
Quick. Quick. Think. Think.'

This is a quick read, sometimes confusing as it quick-switches around time (though it might be made clearer through typography in the final copy). Don't expect character development and we have to piece together aspects of the story as it runs through Ana's head. I'm a bit on the fence with this one as it's never really as raw and powerful as it could have been.

The writing is sublime, and poetic. I had my doubts about the novel when I saw the words "grief" and "adultery" but this themes are so elegantly handled... What a beautiful cover and a matching content, a book that is stunning inside out.

I was given a copy of this book by Net Galley in return for my review.

I’d give this book 3.5 out of 5.

When I requested it I didn’t realise it was written in verse, and I thought that would put me off, but surprisingly it didn’t! You quickly get used to the writing style and it’s refreshing not to have to read screeds of unnecessary information like you do in some books. That’s a positive for the book- now a negative. There was a lot of time shifting with no real sense of where you were - I’m not a huge fan of time shifting in a book, but when you’ve no sense of where you are, it’s even more confusing. I’m not sure about the parts that this book is divided into either- and what that signifies. There’s maybe a whole other meaning that’s completely gone over my head!

I liked the character of the best friend, Tanya, but some of the other characters were instantly forgettable.

Without giving anything away, I liked how we didn’t know about something, and didn’t know that we didn’t know, until it was brought up. That was quite clever.

From the opening of the book, you knew it wasn’t going to be a cheery read, but it didn’t depress me. It is a sad tale, on a few levels, about love and when it happens at the wrong time- as well as the impact that has. The book unravels that, and how the main character attempts to deal with it (rightly or wrongly).

Would I recommend this book? Probably not. Did I enjoy it? It was OK- had it been any longer, probably not. Would I read another book by Sarah Crossan- possibly!

As soon as I saw this book, the cover drew me in. The synopsis was intriguing too - it's a story of love and grief, but it's not the usual boy meets girl. The book is told from the point of view of Ana, a woman embroiled in an affair with a married man, who is left bereft when he dies suddenly with no outlet to grieve because no one knew of their relationship in the first place. The author already boasts a successful career in young adult fiction, but this is her first foray into the adult realm. Oh, and it's written in verse.

So, lets talk about the writing style first. I know a few of her YA novels were written in this style too, but this is my first experience of it and I really wasn't sure I'd like it. I'm not a poetry fan, but I can appreciate beautiful, poetic prose and there's a wealth of it here. The writing style actually makes this book a quick and compelling read, scattered with short, sharp lines which pack a powerful punch. I liked it a lot more than I thought I would.

Onto the subject matter, and it is heavy. This book is a poignant exploration into the pain that comes hand in hand with infidelity, not just for the oblivious spouses but for those doing the cheating too. Ana unravels her story and her relationship slowly, with a narrative which moves between past and present day. In present day, her lover Connor is dead and she is drowning in her own private grief and obsession, but in the past she gives us a glimpse into many parts of her life which helped shape her, including her relationship with Connor. At first their relationship seems passionate and unstoppable, but it becomes clear that this isn't a perfect affair. Even at the height of the affair, she is desperate for more than he is offering, possessive and envious of his wife, Rebecca. Once he dies, she can't let her obsession die with him, and she pushes her way into his life, taking items from his home as souvenirs and befriending his unsuspecting widow.

There are no winners in this poignant little story, and there are no perfect people either. All of the characters are flawed and troubled in their own way, there's no black and white here but Crossan takes her tie exploring all the shades of grey and leaves it open to the reader to make their own judgements. A quick read that will have you thinking for a while after you finish it.

wow! This is definitely going to be in my top ten books of the year. This is a superb read and one that I will be highly recommending. I have been absolutely unable to put this one down.

Full review to follow on publication day.

I’m not sure if this just downloaded incorrectly or it’s meant to be written in prose? Either way it took a while. But I have a rule that my old English teacher taught me. Always read the first 50 pages before deciding. Generally I finish a book after this rule and I know I’d have missed some gems if the first 15 pages or so had been my marker. This is one of them. Please keep going. It’s fab. Apparently her first adult novel? I’m willing to try her other books as young adults stories are often as good or better than adult ones! 4/5

this is a good read. Took me a little while to really engage with the storyline and characters but once I did I found that I enjoyed the book a lot.

Captivating and compelling story very cleverly written in poetry form. Crossan’s first step into adult fiction is well worth the wait.

Beautiful, tender, honest and raw.
A story of how our decisions in love can have rippling effects on those around us.
How we try to keep that person we love so much close to us, even when they are no longer there, and how our emotions can drive to become the most deranged person that we can no longer understand.

I really enjoyed reading this book. It's quite a quick read and tells the story of an extra marital relationship. Ana is the narrator. She and Connor had an affair for 3 years until he was tragically killed. So she is left to grieve alone. She tells the story of their relationship and her subsequent effort to find a way in to the life of his wife. I recommend this book as something out of the ordinary. Thanks to NetGalley for a preview copy.
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