Holmes conjures the best qualities of both the short story and the novel to create a lyrical evocation of the beauty, pain, and wonder of growing up. Don’t Tell the Bees oozes with love and conflict and of a girl’s passage into womanhood. Each chapter is a perfect little stand-alone flash story, a stunning example of what the form can accomplish. The reader is thrust heart-first into the difficult life of No-more and a world of unforgettable characters carved tenderly and precisely. Holmes recreates, in sensory-soaked detail, the world of a small French village near the Second World War. I marvel at how the author blends each stand-alone story into one masterful whole: poignant, compassionate, and profound in emotional impact.
~Meg Pokrass, author of The Dog Seated Next to Me, Pelekinsis.
Its absolute originality is expressed in the characters’ eccentric qualities, the richly textured language, the blending of history with fable, and the way that its fragments collectively evoke the whole story of a village and way of life.
~Michael Loveday, author of flash fiction novella, Three Men On The Edge, V Press
The language is from the gut, newly-forged and freighted
~Jane Fraser, author of The South Westerlies, Salt Publishing.
Paperback; 133mm x 203mm; 60pp
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