Their Heart A Hive by Fox N. Locke

Published – Out Now

Price - £1.59 Kindle eBook

It isn’t until meeting Lowen, a lowborn boy dealing with grief and battling bad luck, that the immortal genderqueer aristocrat, Tamorna Rosen Roane, can face the shame of their past lives and move towards catharsis.

Inspired as much by the rugged beauty of south-eastern England as Cornish folklore, this summery gothic portrays a queer-normative society with an 18th century flair. A story of shanties and secrets, of long dead giants and merfolk that mind the sea, where piskies provide luck and the beast of Brasbudfand stalks the night.

Balancing the macabre and the absurd, this unconventional coming of age story promises twists and turns and lyrical prose aplenty. A story about the power of kindness and empathy and how no one is ever beyond help. If you've a love for Jane Eyre, Dracula and queer-centric stories, this debut YA novel may just be for you.

Finding out where you fit in the world is often a key theme in fantasy. You’re not always going to live and be around the people you grew up with and at some point that you need to find out who you now are. Admittedly life has less dragons and wizards to battle but as you get older you realise that you’re always changing and re-aligning who you are and where the people you fit with are too. That is why fantasy never really grows old. In Fox N Locke’s charming fantasy story The Heart A Hive we watch a young man find an unusual place to fit and get a gentle but strange mystery to solve.

Lowen is a young teenager living on the coast with a family where his father is lost to see. After though a strange incident where he killed an oddly behaving bee; he is summoned to the enigmatic Honeymoore Manor. There he meets Tamorna Rosen Roane who is both The Lord and The Lady of the major. He discovers all the jobs that a large manor requires and how much of it in this house require bees. But Lowen is always conscious of his home and family down the road but increasingly he starts to ponder the mystery of the house, the staff and their employer. The secret lies within the bees that will explain the manor’s past and future.

This is a gentle and very enjoyable read that mixes slice of life chapters with a sweet found family tale and at the heart a tale of kindness and redemption. What makes it work is how Lowen telling us the story but not in dry modern prose but with a local (almost Cornish) dialect that uses local slang and very much his initially limited point of view to craft the world they know and this strange world of upstairs downstairs life that the Manor provides. The initial chapters are very much slice of life as we see Lowen with their family, then travelling to the Manor and going round all the staff to show their roles and make new friends (or not). It’s a gentle pace and very relaxing to read. Locke makes this world one where queer normative relationships are fully acceptable. A farmer has her multiple wives. Lowen has a teenage relationship of first passions with a local noble’s son and it is not the fact that Lowen’s sexuality instead the problem just that Lowen is working class. This is a gentle reminder that fantasy does allow you to change the world and explore the consequences when you do and that makes the story feel refreshingly new too in the process. This all makes it an intriguing world and cast you actually enjoy time with.

There is though, a mystery to solve and I really liked the mysterious character of Tamorna. While they do shift gender as they please (and none of the staff care about that at all) the real focus is who or what they are I terms of their ever-changing age and definite all see-ng abilities. Here the story moves into examining the world’s folklore and we get tales of heroes, merfolk, and vanquished giants to unpick. While this is all gently unravelled what impressed me is Locke’s ability to drop moments of horror and poignancy into the tale but without changing the tone of the tale too much. This is ultimately a story about acceptance and allowing yourself to forgive yourself and stop hurting others with misplaced guilt. In parallel Lowen needs to learn how to deal with a new relationship with a fellow servant that he bonds with even when his former nobleman arrives back on the scene. The stakes are relatively low; it is all about the staff and their future, but you do importantly care what happens to everyone as you get to know them. The final scenes are wonderfully bittersweet and poignant but feel strangely mythic too.

There are a few pacing issues and you do wonder initially if this is more slice of life than fantasy mystery but the story once we meet Tamorna then starts in earnest; and I really did enjoy finding out who they were and what this meant for Lowen and their future. Their Heart A Hive is an emotionally intelligent fantasy that delivers a gentle warming of the heart (even mine!) and a fun read well a look!