Bingo: Sex; Passport: Allegory
I guess I was prejudiced against this book from the start. This year, my home book club is reading a different genre each month and this was the group choice for “fantasy”. While some reviews compared it to The Hunger Games, or The Handmaid’s Tale, I thought it was telling that its award nominations were for “women’s fiction” and not fantasy.
I can see why this book was well received. Life in a beehive is an unusual premise for a novel, and it appears to be well researched, with lots of detail about the physical and social structures that bees live within. There are some exciting events, including a wasp attack on the hive, a mouse getting in, and poisoning from pollen tainted by crop spray, while foraging outside of the hive gives an interesting view of human impact on the natural world.
I get that I was supposed to be impressed by plucky little Flora 717 the low caste sanitation worker bee who kept the secret of her illicit eggs from the evil priestess caste and the fertility police, resisting the oppressive hierarchy while still loving her queen, but all I could think was, what a Mary Sue this bee is. OK, the bee is not literally an author stand-in, but an excuse for all her bee research to be laid out for us to admire. Flora can do every single job inside and outside of the hive, better than everyone else, and go anywhere, and see the secret religious texts, and save the hive from threat after threat. Sure …..
So maybe read this book, if you are interested in bees.
