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Your next favorite book
is waiting.
The Bear and the Nightingale meets Weyward in this enchanting, deeply compelling debut about love and power, autonomy and consent.
Once upon a time, on the edge between meadow and forest, there was a lonely child with only his older sister for company. In exchange for being left in peace, his sister made him a playmate-Daye, a girl woven from flowers and words. And for the first time, this boy, Rory, had a friend.
Rory couldn't be happier, until he learns that Daye is a short-lived creature. At the end of each season, she must be woven back together or fall gruesomely apart. And every time Daye falls apart might be her last.
As Rory and Daye grow older and the line between friendship and romance begins to blur, Rory becomes desperate to break this cycle of bloom and decay. But the farther Rory pushes his research and experiments to lengthen Daye's existence, the more Daye begins to wonder just how much control she really has over her own life.
As a loose reimagining of the story of Blodeuwedd from Welsh mythology, Honeysuckle is an entrancing, inventive, and unsettling debut.
"Fridman-Tell's gorgeous debut fantasy luxuriates on the border between romance and horror...Fridman-Tell uses her eerie fairy tale premise to masterfully unpick all of the squirmy ethical implications of the created-lover trope, spinning a story that is as powerful in its human aspects as in its magic. This stuns." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Fridman-Tell's reimagining of the blodeuwedd legend from Welsh mythology is as beautiful as a flower while unearthing the rot festering at their roots...Highly recommended for fans of feminist fairy-tale retellings and romantic horror." —Library Journal
"Bar Fridman-Tell's debut novel, Honeysuckle, emerges as a hauntingly lyrical, fairytale-like horror. I was absolutely enthralled with Fridman-Tell's lush world building and devastatingly beautiful prose...A searing addition to the literary horror genre, Honeysuckle offers a tale in which beauty is inextricably intertwined with rot, and with the unrelenting passage of time, love serves as both a shield and a dagger." ―Kalynn Bayron, New York Times bestselling author of Cinderella Is Dead and This Poison Heart
This information about Honeysuckle was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Bar Fridman-Tell has a BA in art history and an MA in English literature. (She gleefully wrote her thesis about Victorian vampires.) She has worked as a bookseller and a Hebrew-English translator, and is about to start her master's in library and information sciences. She lives in Toronto with her professor husband and two very fluffy cats.
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