Honey Thief (Graver)

The Honey Thief
Elizabeth Graver, 1999
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780156013901

In Brief  
Elizabeth Graver's first novel, Unravelling, was hailed on publication as "exceptional" (New York Times Book Review), "a pleasure" (New Yorker), and "exquisitely poignant and sensual" (Boston Globe). Now, in her second novel, she proves herself to be a major voice in American fiction. The summer that eleven-year-old Eva is caught shoplifting (for the fourth time), her mother, Miriam, decides the only solution is to move out of the city to a quiet town in upstate New York. There, she hopes, they can have the normal life she longs for.

But Miriam is bound by a past she is trying to forget, and tensions escalate. It is only when Eva meets a reclusive beekeeper that she—and her mother—can find their way back to each other, and can begin life with renewed promise. A haunting novel of memory and desire, The Honey Thief reveals the healing power of friendship and the ineradicable bonds of mother and child. (From the publisher.)

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About the Author 

• Birth—July 2, 1964
• Where—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Education—B.A., Wesleyan University; M.F.A., Washington
   University (St. Louis); doctoral study, Cornell University
• Awards—see below
• Currently—teaches at Boston College

Elizabeth Graver is the author Awake, The Honey Thief, and Unravelling. Her short story collection, Have You Seen Me?, won the 1991 Drue Heinz Literature Prize.

Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories (1991, 2001); Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards (1994, 1996, 2001), The Pushcart Prize Anthology (2001), and Best American Essays (1998). Her story “The Mourning Door” was award the Cohen Prize from Ploughshares Magazine. The mother of two young daughters, she teaches English and Creative Writing at Boston College (From the author's website.)

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Critics Say . . . 
Traditional though not quaint, filled with elegant and straightforward language, it tells a completely contemporary story about a young girl on the verge of adolescence, even as it manages to sidestep the clichés of the genre.
Katharine Weber - York Times Book Review

That is what Graver evokes constantly here, with no pat ending or easy answers but admirable talent and truth: the sense that in raising a child we get the chance to improve upon ourself.
Andy Solomon - Boston Globe

Elizabeth Graver is rapidly proving herself one of our finest writers on the grand drama of simply growing up.... [Her] vision is magnificiently detailed and precise, offering readers a memorable and sustained glimpse at the mysterious machinations of life itself.
John Gregory Brown - Chicago Tribune

As delicately as bees build honey-combs, Graver constructs an affecting story about the costs of starting over, of hoping for better after being stung by life. "A life...could go either way, climb steadily toward its better possibilities or sprial down," Miriam says at the beginning of this sad, wise novel. By the end, the balance has tipped toward possibilities rather than disappointment. But as Graver shows, like farm-fresh honey, happiness takes time and has its risks.
John Freeman - TimeOut New York

A mother and daughter trying to overcome trauma, loneliness and an uncertain future are not a new combination in literary fiction. But in her wise and accomplished novel, Graver navigates the crossroads in her characters' lives with compassion and skill, and tells a story that touches the heart without succumbing to sentimentality or easy answers. After 11-year-old Eva Baruch is caught shoplifting for the third time, her desperate widowed mother, Miriam, decides they must move from their apartment in lower Manhattan to a place where they can start new lives. She finds a job as a paralegal in the Finger Lakes region of New York State, and they move to a farmhouse a distance from the nearest town. Miriam seems competent and self-contained, but she has been frightened since the first year of her marriage to Francis DiLeone, and the facts about her husband's fatal heart attack when Eva was six are revealed only gradually through flashbacks. Miriam is Jewish, while Francis was the son of a fanatically Catholic mother who talks to saints; the specter of inherited mental illness haunts Miriam even as she struggles to support herself and Eva and strives to keep her daughter safe and healthy. Meanwhile, a resentful Eva, suddenly transplanted to a place where she has no friends or resources, visits Burl, a shy, middle-aged loner who has quit his career as a Philadelphia lawyer to retreat to his grandparents' farm, where he raises bees. Burl's kindness and patience in teaching Eva the intricacies of bee-keeping and honey gathering help her to quell the panic attacks that presage her kleptomania, an irresistible impulse to acquire talismans against imagined disasters. When events come to crisis, Graver wisely refrains from resolving them in a neat or romantic closure. Her touch is both subtle and honest, grounded in reality but acknowledging the essence of human striving for companionship and happiness. Her ability to create nuanced, fallible characters who doggedly strive to go on with imperfect lives adds emotional resonance to this touching tale. Readers who enjoyed Amy and Isabelle will welcome the similar sensibility they find here.
Publishers Weekly

(Young Adult) Eva DiLeone, 11, has been arrested several times for shoplifting. Her mother Miriam moves them from Manhattan to a small community near Ithaca, NY, hoping for a better environment for her daughter. She has a secret that Eva knows nothing about: the girl's father, who supposedly died of a heart attack when she was six, actually committed suicide in the throes of mental illness. Miriam fears that Eva has inherited her father's imbalance. Meanwhile, it's summer, and the girl is lonely. Down the road lives a beekeeper, and Eva is drawn to the jars of honey he puts out for sale at the end of his driveway. She takes one and, a few days later, takes another. Burl, of course, knows perfectly well who has stolen his honey, but encourages Eva's interest in beekeeping and lets her help him. One day a package labeled "Live Queen Bees" arrives when Burl isn't home and Eva decides to put the new queen inside the hive. When she is badly stung and hospitalized, Miriam is furious with Burl and, confronting him, blurts out her fears. In doing so, she realizes that she must tell Eva the truth about her father and try to establish a more honest relationship with her. YAs will appreciate this realistic portrayal of a relationship between mother and daughter, and the rocky friendship of a lonely girl and a shy man with problems of his own. — Molly Connally, Kings Park Library, Fairfax County, VA.
Library Journal

An agreeably unruly second novel, about a preadolescent girl's gradual indoctrination into adult imperfection and discomfort, from Graver (Unravelling, 1997, etc.). The protagonist is 11-year-old Eva Baruch, a New Yorker transplanted by her widowed mother Miriam to a rural upstate town, after Evas been caught repeatedly shoplifting. Miriam (whose viewpoint is one of four among that Graver shifts adroitly) is determined ``to weed her daughter's brain, to take out the choked, unhappy parts and let the good parts grow''for they have together suffered the loss of Eva's father Francis, following an illness far more perplexing and harrowing than Eva knows. While Miriam adjusts to a new home and job, Eva wanders the neighborhood, forming an unlikely friendship with Burl, a 40ish near-recluse who supports himself and his avocation of beekeeping as an author of miscellaneous how-to books. Though the subplot involving Burl's loveless and lonely existence deflects attention from the novel's rightful concentration on Miriam and Eva, Graver makes ingenious connections between her two protagonists' individual and familial "worlds'' and the beehive's "world under siege in ways invisible to the human eye'' (the books been expertly researched). The flashback chapters describing Miriam's hopeful marriage to the charismatic, seductively eccentric Francis, his protective love for his infant daughter, and the delusional paranoia (eventually diagnosed as bipolar disorder) that destroys him are impressively, suspensefully dramatic. Only in the thickly plotted closing pages, when all its several strands are pulled together tightly, do we feel the weight of an author's over-managing hand. And even then, the storys never less than absorbing and emotionally satisfying. It's a measure of how firmly it grips us that we wishas do its characters that everything about themselves and their lives could be perfect.
Kirkus Reviews

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Book Club Discussion Questions 

1. From the first chapter on, Eva's desire to steal forms a central strand in the novel. Why do you think she has this impulse? How is it related to the events of her early childhood? To her present circumstances? What is it allowing her to work out or stave off? What do you make of the fact that Miriam also stole when she was younger, as we see in her memory of her trip to Mexico (page 23)?

2. The Honey Thief takes place both in Manhattan and in a rural town in upstate New York. How is this dual setting important? At one point, as Miriam considers moving to the country, she remembers Francis scoffing at what he called "the Geographic Cure" (page 22). Was Francis correct in thinking that changing location is no solution to life's troubles? What effects does the move eventually have on Miriam's and Eva's relationship? On their individual development?

3. What is Burl's role in the book? What does beekeeping mean to him? To Eva? To their growing friendship? What compels Eva to open up the hive toward the end of the book? The world of the bees and the social world of people in the novel intersect in many ways. How would you describe those connections?

4. "She asked her mother questions," we read of Eva, "and her mother answered, and the answers both soothed and itched, so Eva asked again and yet again" (page 200). Why is Eva so interested in hearing stories about the past? What happens to those stories (for example, the one about how Miriam and Francis met, in Chapter Five) as they are told or remembered over time? What is the function of stories or memories about the past for the different characters in the book?

5. There are many instances, in The HoneyThief, of people lying, skirting around the truth, or omitting key details. Eva neglects to tell her mother about Burl; Burl covers up for Eva when Miriam asks him if she ever stole honey; Francis withholds information from Miriam about his illness. Most important, Miriam misrepresents the past to Eva. How do you understand the motivations behind these various dodgings of the truth? Should Miriam have been more straightforward with her daughter? What made her behave the way she did? What are the obligations, in a family or friendship, to reveal or withhold the truth?

6. Author Elizabeth Berg wrote that "in The Honey Thief, Elizabeth Graver captures the mixed pain and pleasure in the mother/daughter relationship [and] illuminates the sharp-edged longings of adolescence." A number of recent novels explore relations between mothers and daughters, among them, Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John, Elizabeth Strout's Amy and Isabelle, and Kaye Gibbons's Sights Unseen. What links do you see between The Honey Thief and these books or other recent novels about mothers and daughters?

7. Mental illness is a specter throughout the novel, most directly for Francis, but also for Miriam as she watches Eva grow up and worries that the child may have inherited her father's disorder. How does the novel explore what it's like to live under such a shadow? How does Francis's illness bring out or suppress parts of him? Of Miriam and Eva? Why is Miriam so worried that Eva might end up like her father? What is your evaluation of Eva's mental health?

8. Why do you think Elizabeth Graver chose to tell this story from three perspectives, instead of, say, sticking to Eva's perspective? How do the fears, hopes, and longings of Eva, Burl, and Miriam echo with or contradict each other? Why are we never given direct access to Francis's point of view? The book ends with Burl's perspective, as he watches Eva and Miriam at the observation hive. What has shifted by the end of The Honey Thief for each of these three people? How have these changes come about?
(Questions written by author.)

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