Here Is the Beehive, Irish writer Sarah Crossan's first adult novel (after YA titles including One and Toffee), introduces an estate lawyer, Ana, as she receives a call from the wife of her just-deceased lover. To execute his will, she must set off on a messy journey through her private grief. Ana's passionate affair with Connor lasted three years, and she's destroyed most of her life to sustain this relationship--and he's gone. So who is she now?
This is a novel in verse with lines that break across the page, representative of Ana's unbalanced perceptions and reality. Told in second-person point of view, Ana examines herself as she addresses Connor, recounting their past and telling him about her present: how she's been trying to befriend his wife, how she's thinking of him always, how deeply she resents him. A woman of many contradictions, Ana seems to love and hate Connor--and possibly herself as well. She paints herself as the victim in nearly every memory, but in the details, readers will see through her self-deceptions. For while she complains about Connor's unwillingness to leave his family, it's only after many pages that she mentions the other people in her own life, as though they are the background to a much more important scene--her affair. She repeats to herself, to Connor, to readers how good she is, even when her own words tell a wildly different story.
At its heart, Here Is the Beehive is a complicated character study, with a messy, damaged protagonist who might not be a heroine at all. --Suzanne Krohn, editor, Love in Panels