Book Review: Honeysuckle is Gothic Horror Meets Welsh Fairytales in this Modern Nod to Frankenstein

What if you annoyed your big sister as a child, so she created a playmate for you out of flowers and plants using construct magic, which exists in an alternate world to ours, and that playmate became your best friend? As you grew, you became inseparable, but every season she had to be made anew with the seasonal plants and flowers in order to ‘live’. You create your own sign language to communicate, because of course, Blodeuwedds can’t speak. This is Honeysuckle by Bar Fridman-Tell. What starts out as a fairly sweet and innocent story of a lonely little boy living in the remote countryside turns sinister very quickly. Moral questions of free will and consent come into play, and as he and Daye get older, the story gets darker. Obsession, control, freedom are all themes explored. And yes, there’s even a some nods to Frankenstein. It’s gothic horror litfic at its finest. This is NOT a book I would normally reach for, but I have to say it was executed so well, and the writing was haunting and beautiful, while tackling some pretty hard topics. This is a book that will make you think and question.

Things to Know:

• Gothic Horror

• Literary Fiction

• Fairytale creatures

• Alternate world with magical constructs

• TW: Consent

I felt so bad for Rory. He’s a little boy who’s parents have basically abandoned them to their country house, and all he wants is to play with his big sister who clearly has no time for him anymore. Wynne, his sister, is clearly a brilliant girl with a bright future, and utilizes her skills to create Rory a playmate so he’ll just leave her alone. She contructs a Blodeuwedd, a girl made from flowers and plants, and in the beginning, she’s the perfect playmate.

Rory calls her Daye, and it’s not long before he does everything with her. After the first season, Wynne and Rory realize Daye falls back to dust and rotten plants if she’s not reconstructed, he’s devastated. So, like a good big sister, Wynne helps him revive Daye each season. It’s really not until she leaves early for college that things take a darker turn. Rory and Daye become closer and closer, and like any hormone raging teen, he starts to have feelings. It also doesn’t hurt that Daye is an ethereal beauty.

I don’t want to give too many details or spoilers, but this book was so well written, because you start to feel the weight of what’s coming even before anything happens. You can clearly see the path Rory is headed down, and the spirals of anxiety, obsession, and what he thinks is love. He’s desperate to find a way to save Daye, but he’s also living two lives: one with her, and one with other humans in the city. It gets complicated.

Daye’s character is equally interesting as she finds her voice and wars with her own feelings and thoughts. Is she a person? Does she have free will? Can she escape? Does she want to? Can she experience love?

Overall, I would absolutely recommend this book if you’re wanting to try gothic horror out as a genre. I do wish we could have gotten a bit more information about the world and magic because it was so interesting. It reminded me a lot of The Bone Shard Daughter’s magic system. And I was also shocked to realize it was written in a somewhat modern alternate world, because at first that’s not apparent.

The audiobook was beautiful and haunting and I would highly recommend an immersive read. You can find the audiobook on Audible or Libro.fm (ProTips: Audible is 99 cents/mo for three months right now AND you can get two free audiobooks on Libro.fm with the code SWITCH right now).

Fave quotes:

“All his feelings were tossed on the surface like driftwood, pale and stark.”

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“He could no longer recall their features as they looked at him, only the way they looked in photos, smiles practiced and distant.”

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“The evening city was a different, unknown creature, even more foreign than the morning kind.”

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