I could not put this book down. I took it on vacation to Rome with me, and I found myself wanting to slip away back to The Honey Farm. Unfortunately, the ending left me flat. I closed the book wondering what had just happened. It felt like I'd been abruptly booted from a party I was enjoying without understanding why. All of that said, the writing is beautiful and the story compelling.

Another book finished on vacation, actually somewhere over Montana according to the photo gps. I started this one for a book speed date, back on Reading Envy Podcast Episode 120, and liked it enough to finish it.

Cynthia runs a farm in Canada where the honeybees are in danger due to drought. She invites artists to stay, room and board and creative space in exchange for working on the farm. Silvia is a young poet, Ibrahim is a painter, just two of the artists whose lives will change on the farm during increasingly ominous events. While I found the metaphor and allegory to be heavy handed at times (literal plagues, artist colony, you get the picture), I was interested to the end.

Thank you to Netgalley for this ARC. Psychological suspense isn't normally my thing, and I think that is because in the few novels of that style that I've tried, it has been so over the top. But in this novel, it was subtle and sort of built in intensity as the story progressed. There was a bit of foreshadowing here and there, just enough to make me wonder what was coming next..and I was definitely creeped out by Cynthia the entire time. For a moment there I wondered if Ibrahim was in on the whole thing. I kept on rooting for Silvia to just leave the farm, and wished Ibrahim would have taken more of a stand. The parallels between the power struggle that was going on at the farm and those that occur among bees was interesting and well-done. And I certainly don't need everything wrapped up in a tight little bow, but I wished the ending would have been more conclusive. A creepy, suspenseful read!

2.5/3 I was really captivated by the premise of this novel: a struggling bee farm invites artists to live and work for free while doing some beekeeping to offset the cost of room & board. Where do I sign up? I guess I'm not really an artist, but I'm not really sure most of these people were either.

But as I read, I found that I wasn't connecting with any of the characters. So instead, my mind wandered to other places- how do these extra workers count for tax purposes? did the farm make them sign any sort of injury wavers? did they have epi pens (or whatever one uses) on hand just in case someone turned out to be really allergic to bees? what kind of business doesn't have a working phone on site?

I enjoyed the bits and pieces of bee facts, but I didn't really care too much about any of the characters or the weird "end of days" stuff that was randomly thrown in.

From the very beginning the author set out to paint a very vivid picture. It was easy to envision the setting because her writing was so descriptive. From the start, you got the picture that something wasn’t quite right with Cynthia. A slow build but an overall good read.

This was an interesting story, a bit eccentric, with interesting characters. It is a unique book, not fitting in any genre.
I liked it, though parts were a little slow, overall I liked the feel of this book and it didn't end the way I expected.

When Cynthia’s farm begins to suffer because of a drought, she comes up with the idea to open up her property as an “artist’s retreat”, where aspiring, poets, painters, sculptors and the like can have free room and board in exchange for manual labor. Poet Silvia and painter Ibrahim are among those who take Cynthia up on her offer. The two are drawn together even as things on the farm take on an almost apocalyptic air. Thousands of frogs, lice and other nasty surprises make resident artists flee – all except for Silvia and Ibrahim. This book was a difficult read for me, it didn’t seem to fit into any genre and I had a hard time warming up to the characters. Lyle’s writing style, however, is lyrical and beautiful