Reading: The Honey Month
Apr. 19th, 2019 10:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_hartI first heard of Amal El-Mohtar when her short story 'Seasons of Glass and Iron' was nominated for the Hugo Awards a couple of years ago (and eventually won). That was the first year I paid attention to the Hugo short fiction nominations (and how I discovered Uncanny magazine, too); I read all of the nominated stories that were freely available online, and El-Mohtar's was by far my favourite, so I went looking to see what else she'd written. The answer turned out to be mostly short stories in anthologies, but there was one single-authored book available on Amazon: The Honey Month.
The Honey Month is a collection of very short stories and poems, themed around a gift of a month's supply of samples of different honeys. Each piece begins with notes on that day's honey - colour, smell, taste - followed by a story or poem inspired by it. El-Mohtar's writing is beautiful: lyrical, sensuous, atmospheric, and several of the pieces in this collection play with familiar fairytale narratives in the way I loved so much in 'Seasons of Glass and Iron'. It's a short book, but utterly delightful and deeply absorbing.
The Honey Month is a collection of very short stories and poems, themed around a gift of a month's supply of samples of different honeys. Each piece begins with notes on that day's honey - colour, smell, taste - followed by a story or poem inspired by it. El-Mohtar's writing is beautiful: lyrical, sensuous, atmospheric, and several of the pieces in this collection play with familiar fairytale narratives in the way I loved so much in 'Seasons of Glass and Iron'. It's a short book, but utterly delightful and deeply absorbing.
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