Bar Fridman-Tell

Honeysuckle is a very loose retelling of a story from Welsh mythology, and it's about a girl made of flowers who must be rewoven at the end of each season or she'll fall apart.

and a lonely boy who will do anything to save her and stop this cycle of bloom and decay, including a lot of things he really shouldn't.

So my first encounter with Welsh mythology, I think like a lot of other people my age, was through Lloyd Alexander and the Chronicles of Verdain.

which is very loosely based on Welsh mythology.

And it took me years to realize that it's even connected.

But I was also always very fascinated by myths and folklore, and pretty much magpied anything I could get my hands on.

And when I was, I think, in high school, I came across the Mabinogion, and it felt a bit like coming home, because I grew up on the names.

And

I absolutely fell in love with the story of David.

It's so pretty and it's so imaginative and it's so full of everything.

But it also never sat well with me that she was framed as the villain.

In the story, a girl is made out of flowers to be a bride as a way to overcome a curse that prevents her husband from taking a human wife.

And she's later turned into a bird, to an owl, as punishment for choosing a different love and a different life.

And the fact that she was framed as the villain, despite never having any choices or any say or any agency, even over her own body, it's changed first from flowers to woman and then from woman to bird.

And it really fascinated me and it really stayed with me and resonated with me.

I think the type of fantasy or the type of books I often gravitate toward are the ones that have

a world with a twist, where you have some element of magic, but it's not seen as magic.

It's seen as commonplace, seen as science in this book.

And that way, when everything else is the same, when it's the same experiences that we have, the same relationships, it's just the cascading ripples of this one change.

I think the really cool thing is that magic, the fantastical, can be both what it is and function as a metaphor, function as a way to talk about things that we experience every day, but from a different angle or like from tilting them on their side and seeing what happens.