The Honey Month: A delicate and unusual collection inspired by honey

The Honey Month by Amal El-Mohtar

Having recently re-read Chocolat I found myself with a hankering for more of that winning combination of sugar and magic. It was lucky then that I stumbled across Amal El-Mohtar’s The Honey Month which provided just what I was after in perfect, petit-four-sized nuggets.

The Honey Month was conceived when the author received a gift of assorted honeys from a new-found friend. Finding herself inspired by the smell, taste and texture of each honey she wrote a quick review of each one, followed by a short story or a poem set to the individual sensation each honey garnered. The result is the Honey month, a collection of 28 magical, whimsical snippets, each as unique as the honey that birthed it.

I am hard pressed to say what I enjoyed more, the stories themselves or the reviews that precede them. Writing about food is a true art and anyone who can avoid repeating tired phrases like mouth-watering again and again has my respect. Amal’s reviews are chatty, she evokes memories from her childhood and compares the colour of the honeys to beer, cider and a wide variety of other beverages and foods. Needless to say I have found myself craving honey more often than ever before and with a greater appreciation for the sheer variety.

The stories in The Honey Month themselves are descriptive and metaphorical. There is more often than not a feminine presence: a young girl, a fallen star, a trapped fairy. Sometimes the girls are really flowers, sometimes it’s not quite clear. There are plenty of bees to remind you where these stories began; indeed the collection is as much a celebration of bees as it is of honey, which seems only right as they did all the hard work in the first place. Nature in general features strongly with day, night, rivers, moons and dawn personified. There’s plenty to interpret and wonder at, and the stories could so easily be dreams, quick snippets of something half-remembered.

One of my favourites in The Honey Month belongs to the raspberry creamed honey whose opening line, “my feet were in the river when the dawn forgot to rise”, is the sort of line my dreams are made of. Another was the story spawned from the Manuka Honey which bucks the trend of the rest of the collection with its medicinal creepiness. (I’ve never tried Manuka honey and I don’t think I will thanks).

The stories vary in tone — in some there is a whimsy and a quiet, pretty sadness, in others a sensuous, sexual undertone, in yet others a deeper loneliness. I enjoyed the change in pace that came from switching between different forms — the short snappy lines of one poem balanced with the elegance of the following story. That said, if I had a criticism of this collection it would be that some of the stories blended into one. The dream-like quality pervades the whole collection and I grew a little tired of repeated references to a mysterious “she” who grows unnamed. Towards the end I wondered if the collection may have been better at 20 honeys rather than 28. Nevertheless I enjoyed the impression that I was left with on finishing and if a few of the stories fell by the wayside they still played their part in building the overall sensation of honey-inspired mysticism.

The Honey Month is the sort of book I’d happily keep on my shelf forever. It’s a tiny thing and an intriguing idea. The delicacy and daintiness of each story makes it something to dip into again and again (and that’s the best honey pun I can manage).