MAY 2014 - AudioFile
Narrator Orlagh Cassidy's enchanting performance enriches this debut novel about how Flora, a lowly sanitation bee, is able to rise through the caste system to help her hive survive attack, starvation, and destruction to meet a bright new future. Cassidy's vivid, engaging characterizations quickly transport listeners into the busy world of the bees, in which the queen rules and the priestesses maintain the hive mindset. As Flora transcends her destiny, moving up through the ranks to forager, Cassidy expertly conveys the bee's astonishment at each new discovery, curiosity about the outside world, and bravery when defending her sisters against attack. 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. C.B.L. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine
The New York Times Book Review - Emma Straub
Laline Paull's ambitious and bold first novel…is told with…rapturously attentive imagination…the tale zooms along with…propulsive and addictive prose…Forward-thinking teachers of high school environmental science and biology will add The Bees to their syllabuses in a flash. Not only is this novel a gripping story of a single bee's life, it is also an impossibly well-observed guide to the important role bees play in our human lives. When I finished the book, I stepped outside my door and into a spring day, full of buzzing and pollen, and I wanted to thank each and every bee for its service. Few novels create such a singular reading experience. The buzz you will hear surrounding this book and its astonishing author is utterly deserved.
Publishers Weekly
02/24/2014
Dystopia meets the Discovery Channel in this audacious debut novel. Flora 717, a bee born to the lowest social strata at the orchard hive, is different than her kin. Her uncommon earnestness and skill lead her to various jobs—from child rearing to food gathering—and earn her the respect and admiration of her peers. But Flora’s advances also expose her to the hive’s questionable social order and attract negative attention from the elite group of bees closest to the queen. Like Animal Farm for the Hunger Games generation, Paull’s book features characters who are both anthropomorphized and not—insects scientifically programmed to “Accept, Obey and Serve,” but who also find themselves capable of questioning that programming. The result is at times comic—picture bees having an argument—but made less so by the all-too-real violent stakes involved in maintaining beehive status quo (sacrifices, massacres, the tearing of bee heads from bee bodies). Dystopian fiction so often highlights the human capacity for authoritarianism, but Paull investigates bees’ reliance on it: what is a hivemind, after all, if not evolutionarily beneficial thought control? And while Flora 717 may not be the next Katniss Everdeen, she symbolizes the power that knowledge has to engender change, even in nature. (May)
Florida Times-Union
A marvelous work of fiction… The parallels to “1984” and Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” are numerous but this story is also its own.
Austin Chronicle
Brilliantly imagined…Paull’s use of human language to describe this tiny, intricate world is classic storytelling at its finest…The Bees boasts a refreshingly feminist spin on fairy tale-style plots….A wildly creative book that resonates deeply for quite a long time.
Washington Post
It quickly became clear that in its basic facts, the novel sticks closely to real-world apian biology and behavior. That is fascinating enough, but Paull deftly wields this information to create an even more elaborately layered culture of beeness…Beautiful.
—Emma Donoghue
THE BEES is one wild ride. A sensual, visceral mini-epic about timeless rituals and modern environmental disaster. Paull’s heart pounding novel wrenches us into a new world.
—Margaret Atwood
[A] gripping Cinderella/Arthurian tale with lush Keatsian adjectives.
—Los Angeles Times
Richly imagined
—NPR
Riveting… evocative and beautiful.
—The New York Times Book Review
Told with rapturously attentive imagination...Few novels create such a singular reading experience.
—Tracy Chevalier
This is a rich, strange book...convincing in its portrayal of the mind-set of a bee and a hive. I finished it feeling I knew...how bees think and live. This is what sets us humans apart—our imagination can...create a complete, believable world so different from our own.
—Madeline Miller
The Bees is an extraordinary feat of imagination, conjuring the life of a beehive in gripping, passionate and brilliant detail. With every page I turned, I found myself drawn deeper into Flora’s plight and her immersive, mesmerizing world.
—Huffington Post
Fascinating… engrossing… Paull’s clear fascination with her source material brings humanity and warmth to a depiction of the remarkable social world of bees, which is no small achievement.
—Tracy Chevaliera uthor of the New York Times bestselling author of Girl With a Pearl Earring
This is a rich, strange book...convincing in its portrayal of the mind-set of a bee and a hive. I finished it feeling I knew...how bees think and live. This is what sets us humans apart—our imagination can...create a complete, believable world so different from our own.
Emma Donoghue
THE BEES is one wild ride. A sensual, visceral mini-epic about timeless rituals and modern environmental disaster. Paull’s heart pounding novel wrenches us into a new world.
Margaret Atwood
[A] gripping Cinderella/Arthurian tale with lush Keatsian adjectives.
MAY 2014 - AudioFile
Narrator Orlagh Cassidy's enchanting performance enriches this debut novel about how Flora, a lowly sanitation bee, is able to rise through the caste system to help her hive survive attack, starvation, and destruction to meet a bright new future. Cassidy's vivid, engaging characterizations quickly transport listeners into the busy world of the bees, in which the queen rules and the priestesses maintain the hive mindset. As Flora transcends her destiny, moving up through the ranks to forager, Cassidy expertly conveys the bee's astonishment at each new discovery, curiosity about the outside world, and bravery when defending her sisters against attack. 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. C.B.L. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2014-04-10
An imaginative—though not wholly successful—debut in which a beehive is a dystopian society where obedience is essential.Flora 717 is a sanitation worker, the lowest order of bee, mute and hulking and ugly. When she cracks out of her gestation cell, she's destined to perform only one role in the hive. But high priestess Sister Sage senses something different about Flora: She can speak and reason, and Sister Sage sees a use for her mutation, reminding others that "Variation is not the same as Deformity." Flora is brought to the nursery to tend the larvae; in another variation from the norm, royal jelly pours from her mouth to feed the babies. Soon she's promoted to Category Two, a nursery for the older grubs, where she again displays a facility beyond her lowly rank. Paull uses Flora's unique abilities to give the reader a working knowledge of the life of a beehive, often to the detriment of character development and drama. Because she has access to the Hive Mind, she's granted access to the Queen and then serves her and reads the hive's history in the sacred chamber. Drones pop up now and then, lazy dandies that the hive sisters service. And spiders make an ominous appearance, trading prophesies of the weather for the sacrifice of aging bees. All would be well with Flora's progression through the ranks except that she has a dangerous secret: She has produced a baby. Though against all the rules—only the Queen can reproduce—her offspring has radical implications for the future of the hive. It's clear that Paull is using the hive as an analogy for a class-bound society, where variation is punished, but this kind of dystopian vision can only thrive when the associations to contemporary circumstances are unambiguous. Much is muddled here, primarily the reader's connection to the heroine, who rarely transcends being a bee.Paull deserves kudos for a daring idea, but the resulting work is burdened by a heavy dose of explication.
