The Bees

A Novel

By: Laline Paull

Narrated by: Orlagh Cassidy

Read by Orlagh Cassidy

Kirkus Reviews raves about her performance calling it "enchanting" and writes "The success of this audiobook lies in Cassidy's respectful yet lively narration, which enables listeners to connect with the story on a number of levels."

The Handmaid’s Tale meets The Hunger Games in this brilliantly imagined debut set in an ancient culture where only the queen may breed and deformity means death.

Flora 717 is a sanitation worker, a member of the lowest caste in her orchard hive where work and sacrifice are the highest virtues and worship of the beloved Queen the only religion. But Flora is not like other bees. With circumstances threatening the hive’s survival, her curiosity is regarded as a dangerous flaw but her courage and strength are an asset. She is allowed to feed the newborns in the royal nursery and then to become a forager, flying alone and free to collect pollen. She also finds her way into the Queen’s inner sanctum, where she discovers mysteries about the hive that are both profound and ominous.

But when Flora breaks the most sacred law of all—daring to challenge the Queen’s fertility—enemies abound, from the fearsome fertility police who enforce the strict social hierarchy to the high priestesses jealously wedded to power. Her deepest instincts to serve and sacrifice are now overshadowed by an even deeper desire, a fierce maternal love that will bring her into conflict with her conscience, her heart, her society—and lead her to unthinkable deeds.

Thrilling, suspenseful and spectacularly imaginative, The Bees gives us a dazzling young heroine and will change forever the way you look at the world outside your window.

The hive as metaphor

While the elite class and the middle class battle, the lowliest and least respected rise to leadership.
A "foreign" untouchable sanitation worker preservers to become a respected leader bringing change from the least expected sect.

I read a print version while listening and had to keep pausing the audible version while annotating my print copy. Some lovely language throughout. Lots of interesting tidbits for gardeners and want-to-be bee keepers or regular folk wanting to provide habitat for pollinators.

Provocative take on some social concepts and behaviors... I think this would make an interesting book group choice paired with Animal Farm, Handmaid's Tale or even The Giver trilogy

The Bees

Any additional comments?

Read by Orlagh Cassidy, approximately ten hours of listening.

A first observation. The religious aspects of phrases like, “Our mother, who art in labor, hallowed be thy womb.”, made me cringe. There are several. It’s a bit of a sacrilege to those that are pious believers, and offensive to compare a queen bee to the Virgin Mary … it’s paraphrasing a well known prayer. I mean, common! I’m not a religious person, at all … but geez.

A second observation. The Bees is one of the most creative stories I’ve read (listened to). This is the story of Flora, a bee. And it is told entirely from her point of view. The author went to extreme detail in the hive mentality, the flora for nectar and pollin, the fauna of other insects and birds, the birthing of bees, the different roles of drones, the queen, her ‘ladies in waiting’, etc. Research for this story and overall creativity is superb.

Narration by Orlagh Cassidy is great. I’ve only listened to her a few times, David Baldacci books, and I have very much enjoyed her interpretations.

Well worth the credits, if you can take some tongue-in-cheek sacrilege, at least I hope it’s tongue-in-cheek. Enjoy!

points for originality!

fascinating viewpoint of life in a. bee colony. at times brutal and often thought provoking. the reader is extremely skilled

A Fable

Okay,so this was clearly a fable. Clever, but not complete. I did not get the moral or the point. And the anthropomorphism was not committed 100%. It bothered me that there were people in the prologue and epilogue, but the bees referred to "people" in reference to the bee population. Oversight or lack of attention to detail. I did finish and even got emotional at moments, but it was surface emotion.

Slow but interesting

I really didn’t like this book much until the very end. It had been recommended to me as something similar to Watership Down, which I don’t feel is a good comparison.

Watership Down was really artfully written to incorporate and explain daily and realistic rabbit life while still telling a story of a great adventure from the rabbit’s point of view. The Bees uses a lot of crutches to explain what’s going on, with lots of human-like objects, expressions, etc., that made me feel like it wasn’t all that necessary for it to be about Bees (it could have easily been done as an alternate universe or future society with humans).

The story was pretty slow, and I spent most of the book wondering where it was going and why I was supposed to care about the main character. However, it all came together in the last 30 minutes of the book, and suddenly it became an interesting story that probably could not have been done without making it about Bees (the mating thing would have been really weird if it were about people!).

So overall I suppose I was satisfied with the story, and am giving it 4 stars instead of 3 because of that. Performance was pretty good with exception to a Glenda-the-Good-Witch voice that the narrator used pretty frequently.