Scan barcode
metaphorosis's review
3.0
reviews.metaphorosis.com
2.5 stars
Struggling to overcome writer's block, Sam Bayer revisits his hometown, and is inspired to write about a murder he discovered as a child. A mysterious woman and some old friends help him to dig into a widening mystery.
I'm closing in on the conclusion that maybe I don't like Jonathan Carroll after all. It's a shame, because I now own a lot of his books. I bought a fair number of them a decade or two back, but my interest gradually waned. I bought a bunch more this year when I saw them on sale, and thought "Hey, I used to like that guy." It might have been better to trust my memory.
Kissing the Beehive is unusual for Carroll in that it's not really unusual. It's a story of crime in a small town that re-emerges years later. While there are suggestions of possible supernatural elements, the book as a whole is firmly grounded in reality in a way that most Carroll books are not. Unfortunately, that leaves us with a standard mystery/thriller that isn't really mysterious or thrilling. Carroll scatters red herrings with a will, but doesn't follow most of them up. It might have been a more interesting story if he did. Instead, the resolution is so mundane as to be unfulfilling. In some ways this book struck me as a rewrite of A Child Across the Sky, but without the magical realist elements. Perhaps its because he introduces both with the same story about finding a dead body when he was young. It was surely a striking moment, and reasonable that Carroll would reuse it in several stories. But in neither book has he really made the most of that impact.
Carroll's narrator, a writer, spends a lot of his time telling stories, talking about stories, and listening to stories. I got the impression that many of these were stories Carroll himself had heard or experienced. Unfortunately, they don't contribute much to the novel, which begins to feel more like a collection of anecdotes than a narrative in itself. Perhaps that's because the core narrative simply isn't that interesting. Without Carroll's supernatural elements to cloak her, one of the key actors (a woman named Veronica Lake) simply comes across as bizarre.
Overall, a readable and inoffensive book, but not one I'd particularly recommend. If you're looking for the Carroll that you've heard about, try Land of Laughs instead.
oklahoma's review
dark
mysterious
reflective
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.5
readerofbooks70's review
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
claudia_is_reading's review
5.0
Now, this was such an interesting book!
A mystery in the past becomes a present mystery, an even more mysterious woman keeps popping up into Sam's life, and suddenly, life is a lot more complicated than it used to be.
What I really like about this book, aside from the main mystery, that was very cleverly done, were the characters. Sam, Veronica, Franny, Edward, Cass, even Johnny Petangles are remarkable, imperfect, human... You understand them, care about them, get angry at them.
Pauline and Junior have been dead for decades, but we see them through the eyes of those who knew them. They are complex, and in love and their story will affect the lives of many.
A very good read, I'll be reading more of this series :D
A mystery in the past becomes a present mystery, an even more mysterious woman keeps popping up into Sam's life, and suddenly, life is a lot more complicated than it used to be.
What I really like about this book, aside from the main mystery, that was very cleverly done, were the characters. Sam, Veronica, Franny, Edward, Cass, even Johnny Petangles are remarkable, imperfect, human... You understand them, care about them, get angry at them.
Pauline and Junior have been dead for decades, but we see them through the eyes of those who knew them. They are complex, and in love and their story will affect the lives of many.
A very good read, I'll be reading more of this series :D
ksparks's review
3.0
I didn't like this one nearly as much as the Wooden Sea. The main character wasn't as compelling and there's nothing surreal in this one--it's a straight up mystery. But it's still interesting enough.
smcleish's review
5.0
Originally published on my blog here in July 2003.
Most of Carroll's novels have fantastical elements - spirits, blurred boundaries between fiction and reality, and so on - even if they start out seemingly realist. Kissing the Beehive is an exception to this, and is thus less individual than Carroll's other novels. It lies more within the crime than the fantasy genre, though it has other elements.
The central character and narrator of Kissing the Beehive, Samuel Beyer, is himself a best-selling novelist, who at the beginning of the novel is suffering from writer's block. We seem to be about to have a novel about the ideas he has and discards, rather like Joseph Heller's Portrait of an Artist, As an Old Man. He fairly quickly has an idea - he returns to the small New England town where he grew up, and begins to write about one of the most dramatic experiences of his childhood, when he and a friend found the body of a young woman while swimming in the creek. Again, Carroll confounds the expectations - the reader things that the remainder of Kissing the Beehive is to be some kind of voyage of self-discovery. In a way this is true, but the novel is far more complicated than that. When someone begins to kill the people Sam interviews, and starts leaving him taunting messages, we move partly into thriller territory. And then there is his relationship with a beautiful but obsessive fan - shades of Stephen King's Misery.
The magical commonplaces of Carroll's writing seems to be entirely absent; there are no talking dogs, ghosts of alternate realities. But the quality is still there; this is one of the best novels I have read all year.
Most of Carroll's novels have fantastical elements - spirits, blurred boundaries between fiction and reality, and so on - even if they start out seemingly realist. Kissing the Beehive is an exception to this, and is thus less individual than Carroll's other novels. It lies more within the crime than the fantasy genre, though it has other elements.
The central character and narrator of Kissing the Beehive, Samuel Beyer, is himself a best-selling novelist, who at the beginning of the novel is suffering from writer's block. We seem to be about to have a novel about the ideas he has and discards, rather like Joseph Heller's Portrait of an Artist, As an Old Man. He fairly quickly has an idea - he returns to the small New England town where he grew up, and begins to write about one of the most dramatic experiences of his childhood, when he and a friend found the body of a young woman while swimming in the creek. Again, Carroll confounds the expectations - the reader things that the remainder of Kissing the Beehive is to be some kind of voyage of self-discovery. In a way this is true, but the novel is far more complicated than that. When someone begins to kill the people Sam interviews, and starts leaving him taunting messages, we move partly into thriller territory. And then there is his relationship with a beautiful but obsessive fan - shades of Stephen King's Misery.
The magical commonplaces of Carroll's writing seems to be entirely absent; there are no talking dogs, ghosts of alternate realities. But the quality is still there; this is one of the best novels I have read all year.
gengelcox's review
4.0
Following the publication of Jonathan Carroll’s last novel, [b:From the Teeth of Angels|319260|From the Teeth of Angels (Answered Prayers, #6)|Jonathan Carroll|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1328777631s/319260.jpg|968928], and his collection of short stories, [b:The Panic Hand|42142|The Panic Hand Stories|Jonathan Carroll|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1266457625s/42142.jpg|41636], the rumors were flying that Carroll was retiring. In interviews and personal comments, Carroll had made it clear that [b:From the Teeth of Angels|319260|From the Teeth of Angels (Answered Prayers, #6)|Jonathan Carroll|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1328777631s/319260.jpg|968928] was the last novel in the “Answered Prayers” group of books. (That group, begun with [b:Bones of the Moon|42146|Bones of the Moon (Answered Prayers, #1)|Jonathan Carroll|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1391047473s/42146.jpg|968918], cannot rightly be called a series, because the stories, although inter-related, are not truly sequential.) When news of his latest book finally arrived, fans met it with relief, although there may have been some trepidation regarding what the book would actually be like.
The faithful should not have worried. Kissing the Beehive, while quite different in plot from all of his previous writing, is still vintage Carroll. It has everything we have come to expect from Carroll after ten books and as many short stories: a first person narrator, quirky characters, richly told details, scenes horrendous and wonderful. Kissing the Beehive has it all — except for the side-step into fantasy.
Bestselling author Sam Bayer has a fine career in writing thrillers, but something seems missing to him after all these years. For the first time, his words fall flat on the page. It is not writer’s block that plagues him, because he still types, the pages still fill up. But instead of the action and intrigue that drew readers into his previous books, he can tell that his new one is lacking any vitality. A chance occurrence reminds him of an instance from his childhood, when he found the body of a drowned woman in his small home town, and he decides to put aside his lifeless thriller and write the true story of the only murder his home town had ever seen.
Like Bayer, Carroll has shifted his genre. Instead of playing on the edge of reality that he had expertly done in his previous work, he keeps Kissing the Beehive firmly grounded. He draws from his own experience as an author to bring to life the author character of his novel, making comments on agents, editors, book tours, and fans that only someone with his experience could make. The prose is still wondrous, however; Carroll may have felt that he was burning out, but there is no evidence of that in these pages. Although fans of his previous work might find themselves continually anticipating strange and magical occurrences, Carroll makes a point in this book of showing that the magically strange occurs naturally in life.
The faithful should not have worried. Kissing the Beehive, while quite different in plot from all of his previous writing, is still vintage Carroll. It has everything we have come to expect from Carroll after ten books and as many short stories: a first person narrator, quirky characters, richly told details, scenes horrendous and wonderful. Kissing the Beehive has it all — except for the side-step into fantasy.
Bestselling author Sam Bayer has a fine career in writing thrillers, but something seems missing to him after all these years. For the first time, his words fall flat on the page. It is not writer’s block that plagues him, because he still types, the pages still fill up. But instead of the action and intrigue that drew readers into his previous books, he can tell that his new one is lacking any vitality. A chance occurrence reminds him of an instance from his childhood, when he found the body of a drowned woman in his small home town, and he decides to put aside his lifeless thriller and write the true story of the only murder his home town had ever seen.
Like Bayer, Carroll has shifted his genre. Instead of playing on the edge of reality that he had expertly done in his previous work, he keeps Kissing the Beehive firmly grounded. He draws from his own experience as an author to bring to life the author character of his novel, making comments on agents, editors, book tours, and fans that only someone with his experience could make. The prose is still wondrous, however; Carroll may have felt that he was burning out, but there is no evidence of that in these pages. Although fans of his previous work might find themselves continually anticipating strange and magical occurrences, Carroll makes a point in this book of showing that the magically strange occurs naturally in life.
davramlocke's review
1.0
When I first heard of Jonathan Carroll, it was from a blog post a few days ago by Neil Gaiman. He said Carroll was not to be missed, that he was great, etc. etc. I did a little research and saw Carroll's name mentioned alongside names like Murakami. What other proof did I need that I should read the works of this man?
Unfortunately, I was misled. Carroll is no Gaiman, and he is certainly no Murakami. His writing is perhaps a notch about a Harlan Coben or a James Patterson. Kissing the Beehive is a third-rate mystery novel with a completely unsatisfying ending and a cast of characters that border on caricatures. It's only saving grace is that the writing is simple enough that one can make it easily to the end of the book in a kind of mindless stupor. I literally can't remember the last time I was so disappointed in a novel. I kept waiting, after every page, for something interesting to happen, or for some transformation to occur. It never happened, and I am left somewhat haunted by the hours I spent wasting my time with this. I suppose not every recommendation will fly. I'm just sad that this one sunk so heavily.
Unfortunately, I was misled. Carroll is no Gaiman, and he is certainly no Murakami. His writing is perhaps a notch about a Harlan Coben or a James Patterson. Kissing the Beehive is a third-rate mystery novel with a completely unsatisfying ending and a cast of characters that border on caricatures. It's only saving grace is that the writing is simple enough that one can make it easily to the end of the book in a kind of mindless stupor. I literally can't remember the last time I was so disappointed in a novel. I kept waiting, after every page, for something interesting to happen, or for some transformation to occur. It never happened, and I am left somewhat haunted by the hours I spent wasting my time with this. I suppose not every recommendation will fly. I'm just sad that this one sunk so heavily.
More...