Counter Arts’ Book Club
Our Very First Book Club Review!
January 2022: ‘Honeybee’ by Craig Silvey
Welcome to Book Club! Where anyone and everyone can say anything and everything about Book Club.
Frankly, a review of the Book Club itself might make for a more interesting read — CA editors: footnote for an end-of-year review special read — but this here read is our first review, of our first book, at the Counter Arts’ Book Club.
Spoiler alerts be damned (there’s your reader warning), here’s our humble little book review…
Honeybee — Craig Silvey
“Late in the night, fourteen-year-old Sam Watson steps onto a quiet overpass, climbs over the rail and looks down at the road far below.
At the other end of the same bridge, an old man, Vic, smokes his last cigarette.”
The book’s blurb on the back cover hooked me. In Australia, suicide is a taboo subject. The conversation and support has improved vastly over the last 20 years, but the word is seldom spoken.
After that first fateful night on the overpass, the book took a surprise direction and took on an additional subject — the transgender experience.
I found the book a quick and enjoyable read. The story, told by Sam (Victoria) Watson, at times felt like a YA novel but the pace and writing style makes the book an acceptable introduction and conversation into the pain, fear and shame of transgender.
Us editors here at CA all had a few issues with the book — generally over the heavy-handed ‘educating’ about trans culture and feminine role interests; as well as the benefactor ending — tiresome and a sloppy “everything’s going to be okay” cliché.
The book is fast paced, though nothing suspense-inducing: timelines are well mixed.
What is well done in the book is definitely the detail in which we understand Sam’s, then Victoria’s, relationships with the people around her. Of notice perhaps is her relationship with her mother. From the natural sense of dependence that a child feels for their caregiver, to the impotent desire of protecting her from her own evil: the drinking, the drugs, and the man she chose to stick with.
Her relationship with her newfound friend, Vic, is heart-warming, but also troubling, and it sets the grounds for the implausible ending we find reading.
While her relationship with her body and gender are described well in sense of interior states (stomach churning, shame, fear, and queasiness), the book fails to give us a believable sense of how this kid elaborates her thoughts around the topic. Also, as briefly noted at the beginning of the review, the author seems to force trans and “feminine” culture in ways that do not appear to fit naturally in the flow of the book. Examples include the way Julia Child is introduced in the book, as well as other figures such as Venus Xtravaganza.
On the note of positives is the importance of having written a book like Honeybee. Not only it shines light on trans youth, and poverty/violence in Australia, but on how difficult (as much as to drive one to consider death as the only solution) is the intersection between these experiences.
It also highlights a chauvinist and misogynist reality often forgotten by Australians living in central metropolitan areas. Unfortunately, transphobia, homophobia, and misogyny are alive and well in Australia too.
The plot packed quite a bit of mischief into it: bank robbery, drug dealing, insurance fraud, addiction, racketeering, larceny, and home invasions, but it fell flat at times despite all the exciting things happening through it.
Regardless that at times the book felt uninteresting and that the end was so magical that it was hard to buy it, it did spark several conversations among the group around tough social topics. Sometimes regardless of the quality, arts impact is measured through how much it actually makes you think, and I think this book made us think a lot.
It also highlights the importance of packaging the POV that is not ours into a story format to make it more accessible.
Our Goodreads-style rating? 3.43
“Meh”
To join us in our Counter Arts’ Book Club and find the listing and links to all the books for 2022, click here:
You’ll also find information about the charity organisation we’ll be donating all proceeds from book club-related stories.
Please feel free to join us in reading the books listed. No matter what month you join in, or in what order you’ll read. We’d also love to read your reviews!