Melissa Makepeace poured herself into running the family farm when her boyfriend, and head beekeeper, vanished on an early spring day, silently absorbing yet another man disappearing from her life. But three months later Beck Wise reappears – thin, pale, with no idea what day it is and filled with strange memories of bees – and Melissa finds herself unravelling multiple mysteries. What had happened to Beck? Where did her father go? How can she keep the farm together? With gorgeous descriptions, deft characterizations and a page-turning plot, Mad Honey immerses the reader in a search for truth bounded by the everyday magic of beekeeping, of family and of finding peace, all while asking how much we really understand the natural world.
"Welch does for beekeeping what W.P. Kinsella did for baseball or Ernest Hemingway did for fishing. Through her deftly-controlled description, we see bee colonies, and the humans that tend to them, from a perspective that is engaging and eye-opening. We are invited to peel back the layers of Welch’s characters and their almost idyllic, agrarian lives to see the pain and angst beneath."
"It had me buzzing and gliding along the golden threads of honeyed magic, simply delighting in the rich and juicy descriptions and then it whipped into a fabulous mystery!"