I learned after reading that this book was part of a wider universe and I think it would have helped if I had read that first. While I enjoyed the read, I never felt completely connected to the universe that Mojzes built.

Maris Gosselin is a woman with history and we get the highlights of that history in fits and starts, which really, is how you get to know a person you meet in the flesh. I liked Maris, even with her dark past. Her character developed well, and she felt like a complete person. In the hands of someone less skilled, she would have been a bunch of tropes strung together with the guts of her enemies.

The plots of the stories were fun, and managed to surprise me, which I appreciated. What looked to be straightforward took enough twists and turns to keep me reading. A nice thing about the collection is each story simply took as long as it took.

The pacing felt natural. I was never in a position where I was waiting and waiting for something to happen, or that things happened too quick for me to follow.

Word choices were a mix of modern and classic and sometimes a turn of phrase would feel off to me. Still, the book was overall a fun read, and I think it will appeal to fans of the genre.

Thank you to NetGalley and Dragonwell Publishing for the opportunity to read the ARC in exchange for a review.

She commands bees, deciphers spells, and survives on instinct. In a world of necromancers and goblins, Lady Maris is chaos wrapped in honey and venom.

Mistress of Bees appears to be a collection of short stories that tell the tales of Lady Maris Goselin. 

Overview

Maris grew up on the streets, and she learned how to survive by any means necessary. She has had to lie, cheat, steal, and then some. Because of this, she doesn’t make many friends. But she has her bees. They protect her and obey her bidding. With some practice, she is also able to decipher spells. 

Her world is filled with necromancers, shapeshifters, goblins, and more. Pair that with Mari's rough and tumble personality, and you get some wild stories. 

Positives 

Maris' world is unique and complex. I have never encountered a world with both necromancers and goblins. There aren’t a lot of authors with the courage to mix mythologies. I personally love it. 

Maris isn’t your typical morally sound, perfect heroine. She is aggressive, vengeful, a borderline sex addict, and probably an alcoholic too. Not the kind of girl you take home to your mother. She pushes away anyone who gets close, if they don’t die first. But there is a side to her that wants to be better. We get glimpses of her being remorseful for her impulsive reactions. I love these types of characters; they reflect the complexities of being human. 

Negatives

Let’s start with the biggest problem, the structure. It is so difficult to read as an average reader. I like complex plots, but it isn’t good when I have to keep rereading sections because the author shifts timelines without my notice. These splits are only identified by a subtle paragraph space. 

You spend the whole book weaving between different points in the past in no structured order. Then you get the random dual narrative in one of the stories. It got exhausting having to work so hard just to read the book; I lost most of the enjoyment. 

Recommendations

★★

I managed to make it through Mistress of Bees purely on my interest in the main character. If she weren’t as intriguing to me, I would have given up. It’s two stars for me. I would have absolutely loved it if they had simply reworked the stories into their chronological organization. There are so many great things, like the reflections Maris makes when she is recalling a memory. But it’s overshadowed by the constant jumping around without clear distinctions.

Happy to give this book 4 stars as it is quite a good read, albeit I found it rather complicated. Good characters and a decent story-line made it readable, but nothing over special.
Would be happy to read further books by this authoe.

Going into this book, I wasn’t certain what to expect. I knew it was a collection of inter-connected short stories in the fantasy genre…but that was about it. I’ve read “interconnected short stories” before and they often nothing more than a regular novel, with the stories simply amounting to what most books call “chapters.”

But this one was different.

I’ve read a great number of “fantasy” books over my reading life but frankly, I’ve been reading less and less over the past few years. This is due mostly to so much repetition. Same old plots, similar settings, and massive world-ending conflicts. And elves. And dragons. Not that I have a problem with those things, but I guess I’m looking for something different.

This book provided just the ticket.

Maris Goselin lives her life in Ashbury and the good citizens of Ashbury know her as a sort of fixer. The one person they can count on to tackle the big threats. Maris has risen from poverty, has mastered the weaving of magic spells, and isn’t too bad with a blade. She has survived the school of hard knocks but also tends to make bad choices and cares not a whit what others may think. Her skills and wit are perhaps exceeded only by her temper. At one point she herself admits to a tendency to piss people off.

These eight stories cover Maris’ entire life, from young thief and troublemaker to cranky old crone ready to pass on her wisdom to the next generation. They truly are individual short stories, each with a beginning, middle, and end. Each was originally published separately. They inter-connect of course, and you’ll find fun easter eggs lying about from previous stories. While Maris is the central character in each tale, the co-characters usually differ (although previous ones will crop up again occasionally). The stories themselves are often written a bit differently from each other too. Some are geared toward a young-adult audience (sort of) while others are filled with bawdry scenes and titillating plotlines.
While we are treated to some world-building and come to understand how magic works here, the book relies on the character of Maris herself. All stories except the last one are told from her own first-person POV and it is her wit, charm, and sometimes unbelievable antics that carry the show.

I’m glad I read this book and look forward to trying other works by this author.

DNF at 56%, when the darkness finally overcame me.

The Mistress of Bees of the title is a sorceress from a poor background. Seemingly abandoned or lost by her parents as a small child, she was helped by a street urchin a couple of years older. They became friends, companions, lovers, had a huge breakup in their mid-teens over some stupid things they both did (mostly her) that meant they had to leave the city, then she did various unsavoury things in order to survive. It was in the mid-book flashback to these years that I left her.

Sure, it's understandable, given her background, that she fell into prostitution, theft, drug use, and eventually murder. It doesn't make me like her, though I did like her somewhat at first; she's wryly funny, determined, has no respect for authority (again, understandable), and while she doesn't have much in the way of a moral sense, she does draw the line at standing by while innocents are killed if she can prevent it. Though in the very first of this linked series of stories, she herself kills innocents who were about to be killed by a monster in order to destroy it and protect the rest of the world. She regrets it, but you know she'd do it again if she had the choice a second time.

The whole book is dark like that. She's not good at making friends, but the ones she does make all die, some of them horribly, at least one because she made a bad decision. In the end, it was too much for me. It isn't grimdark, quite, because she does at least have good intentions and is sometimes able to act on them and help people, at least for a while. But it's not truly noblebright either; at best, it's noblegrimy. It reminded me, especially early on, of Garth Nix's <i>[book:Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz: Stories of the Witch Knight and the Puppet Sorcerer|63076711]</i>: sword-and-sorcery setting, morally grey protagonist(s), dark deeds done for the protection of the world. But it's darker and more depressing than that.

It is well written for the most part, though I'll mention a couple of faults I saw in the pre-publication version I got via Netgalley; they may be fixed in the published book. Firstly, some vocabulary issues, most prominently the consistent use of "discrete" when the author means "discreet," an error even good writers make. But more importantly, and less likely to end up completely corrected, a lot of the apostrophes are either in the wrong place - particularly when plurals are involved - or missing entirely (including in an "its" that should be "it's").

Overall, this is a good book that isn't a good fit for this reader, unfortunately, though I did enjoy some aspects of it.