The History of Bees

Book Title: The History of Bees

Author: Maja Lunde

Date Started: September 6th 2017

Date Completed: September 16th 2017

Genres: Historical, Mystery
Quality Rating: Three Stars
Enjoyment Rating: Two Star

Final Rating: Two stars

Review:

◆ Thanks to NetGalley for this ebook for review ◆

I got 27% through this book and gave up not because it was terrible, but because I was genuinely uninterested and was avoiding reading as a result. Nothing happened nor started to happen in what I read, so I was terribly motivated to carry on.

The big thing that turned me off of The History of Bees is how little worldbuilding we're given. I think it was so important to how well this book was going to be pulled off since we have only one story actually told in our historical canon, and the other two in progressively worse states of a dystopian-ish/sci-fi-ish future (the fact that I couldn't really work out which of those genres it was supposed to be similar to proves my point). It made it really hard to sympathise or even really follow the characters, as many of their dilemmas were circumstantial; providing for the family, dealing with a child who doesn't want to follow your footsteps, raising a child who you know essentially doesn't have a future. I wasn't given enough of an idea of how significant these things were in the context to feel anything for them.

You could rename this book 'Bad Parenting in Three Different Centuries'. From what I read, that was the crux of the story. I would like to think that it develops somewhat further than just that, but I wasn't prepared to carry on and find out. Everyone was dislikeable for me, and as such when mashed together with the lack of contextual information it became three family dramas in a world where I couldn't understand the motivations of anyone. It just felt like three sets of parents making questionable decisions and feeling sorry for themselves.

Another issue I found for the early parts of the book was the lack of cohesion between the stories. I'm all for split stories or multiple perspectives, but if you're going to do that there needs to be a link in situation, story or at least tone. You can't just use it as a way to cut somewhere else when things get boring or you want to extend tension. You start to feel cheated as a reader and have even less of a chance to connect with the characters.

This book gets comparisons to Station Eleven, understandably. Multiple stories across decades where humanity goes into a somewhat apocalyptic scenario, all linked (apparently?) and named after a book that happens to be in the story itself. Personally, I don't think The History of Bees has the spirit and imagination of Station Eleven, but perhaps if you're more into science than performance arts you might prefer it.