History of Bees

I bumped this up my priority list after my brother (who apparently now reads nothing other than a lot of dystopian fiction...after never being interested in reading anything when we were kids!) recommended it to me. I loved the premise that is all too believable; bees have been all but wiped out by the end of the 21st century. Unfortunately, I think the novel as a whole wasn't as great as it could have been. The start is very slow, and the alternating chapters between 3 time periods means that when the story finally starts to kick in, you already know the end result. This would have been fine, if the characters, their emotions, and individual experiences were strong enough to carry the whole book. Sadly, I felt all the characters, other than perhaps Tao, remained distant and closed off to the reader. The short chapters also seemed to end any time I felt like I was finally becoming emotionally involved with the characters and by the time the book returned to their time period I felt disconnected and out of it again. Tao's perspective (in the “future”) was certainly my favourite of the three, but even her story did not seem deep enough to support the whole book. In sum, a pleasant enough read, but I'm slightly disappointed it lacked the emotional kick its premise promised.

I have been, for a few years now, obsessed with bees and the role they play in our ecosystem. When colony collapse disorder started affecting North American bee populations, I was stricken with worry. Maja Lunde's novel is essentially a book written to stoke my anxiety: what would the world look like if the bees disappeared? What could we have done to avoid this? Sure, the book reads a bit like it was written for children, but the story is an important one for our time.

(originally published on inthemargins.ca)