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A review by melbsreads
How to Bee by Bren MacDibble
3.5
Trigger warnings: domestic violence, kidnapping, parental abduction, mental health, death of a parent, grief.
Well, this was a lot darker than I anticipated... I mean, I knew that it was set in a world where bees are extinct and children have to climb trees with bags of pollen to ensure that fruit and vegetables will still grow.
But really, that's a very small part of the story. It's instead about a young girl who desperately wants to be a Bee (as the children carrying pollen are known) but is essentially kidnapped by her mother from the farm where she's grown up with her grandfather and sister to instead work as a servant in the big city. There, she witnesses the domestic violence her mother's new relationship is causing, and the dramatic differences between the poverty she's grown up with and the extreme opulence and wastefulness of the city's rich.
And given that it's a middle grade book, I definitely didn't expect that level of darkness. And while I enjoyed it, I feel like I would have liked it better if it hadn't been *quite* as heavy handed with the serious topics as it was...
Well, this was a lot darker than I anticipated... I mean, I knew that it was set in a world where bees are extinct and children have to climb trees with bags of pollen to ensure that fruit and vegetables will still grow.
But really, that's a very small part of the story. It's instead about a young girl who desperately wants to be a Bee (as the children carrying pollen are known) but is essentially kidnapped by her mother from the farm where she's grown up with her grandfather and sister to instead work as a servant in the big city. There, she witnesses the domestic violence her mother's new relationship is causing, and the dramatic differences between the poverty she's grown up with and the extreme opulence and wastefulness of the city's rich.
And given that it's a middle grade book, I definitely didn't expect that level of darkness. And while I enjoyed it, I feel like I would have liked it better if it hadn't been *quite* as heavy handed with the serious topics as it was...