In a lush, quiet field, a girl made of flowers opens her eyes and meets Rory, a boy who is desperate to have a friend. Magic and horror collide in this stunning debut that explores power, consent, loneliness, and what makes a person.
She was made for him.
Daye was woven together from flowers and magic to be the perfect playmate for Rory, a young boy left isolated in a remote country estate. In the early years, their friendship, almost eerily in sync, is everything the two lonely children could dream of.
But the threat of Daye literally—and gruesomely—falling apart whenever the seasons change drives Rory to learn ever deeper and stranger magic, until the line between what he can do and what he should do begins to blur. And the further Rory experiments, the higher the stakes climb—until the cost of a mistake might be either Daye’s freedom or her life.
Daye can’t help but love Rory, even as he keeps disappearing: into his studies, into the city—a place she, a girl whose heart is built of petals and berries, could never enter without falling apart. But as her choices narrow with each new experiment, Daye begins to wonder at what point the price for loving Rory might be too high.
Loosely based on Welsh mythology, Honeysuckle is a heartbreaking fable of longing and need—for love, for control, and for freedom—and a psychological fairy tale perfect for readers of Eowyn Ivey and V. E. Schwab. Part Wuthering Heights, part Frankenstein, it is its own fantastically twisted tale from a singular new talent in Bar Fridman-Tell.
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"I don't know about everyone else, but this story was absolutely horrifying to me (in the best way possible). Honeysuckle leans fully into gothic psychological horror, not through jump scares or shock value, but through the slow, creeping realization that something is fundamentally wrong. It’s unsettling, grim, and at times genuinely disturbing, especially in how it explores autonomy, control, and as a whole, what it actually means to be human. What stuck with me most is how the story handles power dynamics. The central relationship forces you to constantly question consent, independence, and whether “love” can even exist when one person’s survival depends entirely on the other. It creates this constant tension where you’re just waiting for things to go horribly wrong. . . and that unease never really lets up. It actively challenges the idea of romanticization in a way that feels very deliberate and, again, uncomfortable. As a debut, I think this is incredibly well done, and I’ll absolutely be picking up whatever Bar Fridman-Tell writes next. Bonus points for being a Canadian author. While I would have loved to know more about how magic actually worked in this world, and I did have a good idea of where the book was headed pretty early on, it still kept my attention and I constantly struggled to put it down. I highly recommend it if you like gothic horror, dark fairy tales, and stories that make you feel a little sick (in the best way)."
