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rhiannabeth 's review for:
The History of Bees
by Maja Lunde
This was a very good book. It wasn't exactly to my tastes (very dark, deep and sad, cutting a little too close to home at points and I tend to read for escapism), but it was ambitious and driven and had an unexpected and surprisingly uplifting concept that didn't quite match the tone of the narrators.
(Spoilers following)
Split across three timelines, the plot follows William Savage in England, 1851, as the several depressed biologist finds reason to live through the building of a new, better beehive, only to beaten to the patent not once, but twice, rendering his work useless.
In 2007 in America, through George Savage we find that William's supportive daughter Charlotte took her father's drawings and a son to America and built a family legacy on her father's beehives that has evolved over the generations into George's honey farm. When his bees are killed by Colony Collapse Disorder, George is forced to give up the family legacy of building the hives by hand and order pre-made hives to try and save the business. His 'wayward' writer son Tom finally comes home to help him try to save the farm.
In 2098 in China we meet Tao, a worker who pollinates fruit trees in a dystopian future where the bees have died and the world has been plunged into a hunger crisis. On a day trip with her young son, Wei Wen, he is hurt, and rushed to hospital. Tao embarks on a journey across her dsytopian world to try and track him to a hospital in Beijing, discovering a library along the way, in which she finds a copy of Thomas Savage's book 'The History of Bees', chronicling the years leading up to 'The Collapse on his father's bee farm. Tao realises that her son was most likely in anaphylactic shock. She is found by the government and informed that yes, her son was stung by a bee. She finally gets to see him, but he is dead. However, he becomes an emblem of hope, for discovering the bees have returned. Tao gives the government 'The History of Bees', which contains the drawings of Savage's Standard Hive.
And so, the hopeless design that William Savage thought wasted in the first arc, that plunged him into depression, becomes the light of hope for the whole of humanity two hundred and fifty years later.
I didn't like William. It's incredibly difficult to read a character so manically depressed, so devoid of hope, but the idea behind the story, that he didn't know what his work would one day mean, stuck with me. That's why it was impossible to review this book without a plot summary.
(Spoilers following)
Split across three timelines, the plot follows William Savage in England, 1851, as the several depressed biologist finds reason to live through the building of a new, better beehive, only to beaten to the patent not once, but twice, rendering his work useless.
In 2007 in America, through George Savage we find that William's supportive daughter Charlotte took her father's drawings and a son to America and built a family legacy on her father's beehives that has evolved over the generations into George's honey farm. When his bees are killed by Colony Collapse Disorder, George is forced to give up the family legacy of building the hives by hand and order pre-made hives to try and save the business. His 'wayward' writer son Tom finally comes home to help him try to save the farm.
In 2098 in China we meet Tao, a worker who pollinates fruit trees in a dystopian future where the bees have died and the world has been plunged into a hunger crisis. On a day trip with her young son, Wei Wen, he is hurt, and rushed to hospital. Tao embarks on a journey across her dsytopian world to try and track him to a hospital in Beijing, discovering a library along the way, in which she finds a copy of Thomas Savage's book 'The History of Bees', chronicling the years leading up to 'The Collapse on his father's bee farm. Tao realises that her son was most likely in anaphylactic shock. She is found by the government and informed that yes, her son was stung by a bee. She finally gets to see him, but he is dead. However, he becomes an emblem of hope, for discovering the bees have returned. Tao gives the government 'The History of Bees', which contains the drawings of Savage's Standard Hive.
And so, the hopeless design that William Savage thought wasted in the first arc, that plunged him into depression, becomes the light of hope for the whole of humanity two hundred and fifty years later.
I didn't like William. It's incredibly difficult to read a character so manically depressed, so devoid of hope, but the idea behind the story, that he didn't know what his work would one day mean, stuck with me. That's why it was impossible to review this book without a plot summary.