I don't like this book that much as it was quite rambling and weird. But I was moved by the love that Noah showed his grieving grandmother and also his solidarity with his mother. ( )

Like the Addams Family without the Addams family values.
It’s atmospheric and full of INTENSE family drama. There were characters I HATED (looking at you Eva) but I wanted to see how it played out.
I liked the magical elements even though the “rhyme and reason” of it wasn’t explained (akin to magical realism more than fantasy).
I did not like ANY of the romances. So toxic. Everyone in the book is messed up (except maybe Noah and poor Permony.)
Full of generational trauma, poor communication and some personal empowerment - can’t say I found it “enjoyable” but it was interesting in its own quietly seething way.

Watch reviews here: https://youtube.com/@starkissedstories ( )

Meridia defies death as a newborn barely minutes old. This is how Of Bees and Mist begins. Such a near tragedy doesn't explain why her father is verbally and sometimes physically abusive, or how her mother can't seem to remember Meridia even exists. Ghosts in the mirror are misconstrued as fragments of leftover dreams. The color of the mist outside the family door matters: yellow, ivory, or blue. There was a time before the ghosts and mists, but no one can remember it. All Meridia wants to do is get away from her heartless and cruel family. At sixteen she gets that chance when she meets handsome and charming Daniel. Within a year they are married, but like all good fairytales, Meridia soon finds out she has traded in one horror show for another. This time, her evil step-monster mother performs all the torturing. Helped by an army of fantastical fireflies and bees, Eva manages to make Meridia's life a living hell even worse than when she lived with her parents. Eva acts as a modern day Iago, letting her vicious tongue as her deadliest weapon destroy those around her. No one is safe from her vile talk. Rumors and lies spew like poison. However, as Meridia matures she finds the strength and fortitude to fight back even if that means giving up everything she loves. Mother and daughter-in-law engage in an interesting dance of push and pull for supremacy in the household. There seems to be no end to the animosities. ( )

I thought I'd like this more than I did based on reviews and synopses I'd read. As is often the case, I think my opinion was affected by having listened to the audio book rather than reading it myself. The narrator came off as a little arch, or insincere, which impression of course rubbed off on the characters, who perhaps didn't deserve it.

Some reviews used "magical realism" to describe this, but I'd call it fantasy. But it was interesting to contemplate how and why I felt it crossed the line. I think the setting, which was not any one identifiable time or place or culture, pushed it over the edge into fantasy. I may have liked it more had it stayed more firmly rooted in a realistic setting. Then its message about destructive family secrets and how they twist relationships over the generations might have struck closer to home. As it was, I kept thinking of the adage, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." The characters often struck me as incredibly obtuse about being deceived over and over again by the same person.

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Meridia grows up in a house with ghosts in the mirrors, mysterious mists outside, and a staircase with strangely shifting dimensions. Also a cold, belittling father; a mother who often seems (possibly quite literally) to forget she exists; and vague, troubling memories of something very bad that happened when she was a baby. Eventually she grows up and gets away from that horrible place only to end up living with a mother-in-law who is a million times worse.

The fantasy elements here -- or maybe they're magic realism elements; I admit I've never been entirely clear on or cared all that much about the division between the two -- made this seem like it would be right up my alley. But while there were moments where those elements were interesting, mostly they just didn't do all that much for me. I get what the author is doing with them. There's a lot of taking the characters' personal issues and magically projecting them out into the world, so that marital infidelity might manifest as a descending mist, or the manipulative words of an abusive gaslighter take form as a swarm of bees. And that seems at least potentially interesting, but, I don't know, in the end it didn't necessarily feel like it added much to these characters' stories. And those stories themselves are just overwhelmingly awful, a constant cavalcade of oppressive, abusive nastiness. Which, again, could potentially be worth reading if I felt it was saying something really profound about abusive family dynamics or providing some moving emotional catharsis or something. I suppose I could see how some might find those things in it. But for me, mostly it was just... unpleasant. ( )