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I did not enjoy this book. At first, I assumed the problem was that she stuck too close to bees in nature - she basically took bees as they are in the wild, and gave them the ability for conscious thought. That premise takes a lot of imagination to implement, and some actual time explaining how bees operate to your reader, none of which was evidenced here. So after I finished this book, I did some research to fill in my knowledge gaps, to make sure I gave it a fair review. I thought maybe I just don't know enough about bees, that the book might be an insightful hypothesis of life as a bee.
FALSE. I did a couple of google searches and it seems that very little of the book accurately reflects real honey bees. Some of the same ideas are there, but mutated. Which means this book really just lacks imagination. Cultural and biological aspects were often thrown in and never explained or explored (like what's up with the bee hierarchy? I just assumed it came from actual bees, but apparently not. so what's it based on? what does it mean? what is the purpose? or the pseudo religion of the queen's love?). In fact, some of these aspects were even contradicted later in the story. It made the story flat and bland. I could tell, reading this, that it was a book written about a fictional culture. A book about sentient bees is inherently fantasy - that means you need to build the world. It should be a cultural landscape rich enough that it doesn't feel like you're learning about a culture someone made up. The bee culture felt haphazard and disjointed to me. For me, that made this book pretty two-dimensional.
I also agree with some other reviewers that the bees weren't portrayed consistently. They were humanized one minute, and completely foreign the next. This could have been a cool literary device, but there was no effort to bridge that gap, to allow the reader to understand the alien half the bee. In the end I didn't really care what happened to any of the characters, because they were impossible to know.
There were some other minor nits. The timing was weird - pages were dedicated to the faux-erotic greenhouse scene but then important things like how long it takes an egg to hatch would be glossed over. In fact, a lot of these omissions, like the timing of an egg hatching, had to do with biology. It felt like the author wanted to write a book about bees, but didn't actually want to have to google how bees live. There were a couple spots where the book was contradictory (without giving too much away, there's a place where they explain how queens are made, and its supposed to be this revelation, but then it turns out at the end of the book that is totally not how queens are made. For the record, neither version in the book is how queens are made in real life). There are random events that we spend a lot of pages on but then they are not connected to the overall story (actually, the greenhouse example works for this too). And the erotic flower stuff went too far. It was boring and, I'm sorry, gross. I feel weird smelling flowers now.
All that said, while I did not enjoy this book, I do think the premise was interesting and different, and that's half the battle. I think I actually would consider reading another one of Paull's books in the future.
FALSE. I did a couple of google searches and it seems that very little of the book accurately reflects real honey bees. Some of the same ideas are there, but mutated. Which means this book really just lacks imagination. Cultural and biological aspects were often thrown in and never explained or explored (like what's up with the bee hierarchy? I just assumed it came from actual bees, but apparently not. so what's it based on? what does it mean? what is the purpose? or the pseudo religion of the queen's love?). In fact, some of these aspects were even contradicted later in the story. It made the story flat and bland. I could tell, reading this, that it was a book written about a fictional culture. A book about sentient bees is inherently fantasy - that means you need to build the world. It should be a cultural landscape rich enough that it doesn't feel like you're learning about a culture someone made up. The bee culture felt haphazard and disjointed to me. For me, that made this book pretty two-dimensional.
I also agree with some other reviewers that the bees weren't portrayed consistently. They were humanized one minute, and completely foreign the next. This could have been a cool literary device, but there was no effort to bridge that gap, to allow the reader to understand the alien half the bee. In the end I didn't really care what happened to any of the characters, because they were impossible to know.
There were some other minor nits. The timing was weird - pages were dedicated to the faux-erotic greenhouse scene but then important things like how long it takes an egg to hatch would be glossed over. In fact, a lot of these omissions, like the timing of an egg hatching, had to do with biology. It felt like the author wanted to write a book about bees, but didn't actually want to have to google how bees live. There were a couple spots where the book was contradictory (without giving too much away, there's a place where they explain how queens are made, and its supposed to be this revelation, but then it turns out at the end of the book that is totally not how queens are made. For the record, neither version in the book is how queens are made in real life). There are random events that we spend a lot of pages on but then they are not connected to the overall story (actually, the greenhouse example works for this too). And the erotic flower stuff went too far. It was boring and, I'm sorry, gross. I feel weird smelling flowers now.
All that said, while I did not enjoy this book, I do think the premise was interesting and different, and that's half the battle. I think I actually would consider reading another one of Paull's books in the future.