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.