Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Mary Sue, the bee

The Bees by Laline Paull

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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, […]

Bee biology re-imagined through the language of human dystopia

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The Bees is a very weird and cool book that’s a third-person narrative of a literal bee, navigating the dystopian politics of her hive. There are a lot of tropes in here that are not exactly unique to this book among the glut of other dystopian fiction, but the framing of the insect colony is novel. While, naturally, some liberties are taken with facts, the structure and major events of the novel are based on known entomology of bees and how hives operate. All that […]

Oh no! Not the Bees!!

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The Bees follows a bee named Flora 717.  Flora is in the lowest caste of the hive being one of the sanitation workers.  She immediately finds out she’s different from the other bees, in that she can produce food and feed the babies with “flow” (something that most other bees can’t do). Curiosity typically is punished in the hive but Flora’s courage and loyalty to the hive is rewarded. She experiences things that most bees never get to do–move fluidly between the different castes of […]

Gorgeous, Enthralling, Brilliant.

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The Bees is an enthralling and gorgeously written tale in the tradition of Watership Down. The frightening realism coupled with the brilliant world-building makes for an experience that will haunt you long after the story is over. Flora 717 is born in to the lowly sanitation class of her hive but upon her emergence it is discovered she can make Flow, an essential food source for the babies. She is put to work in the nursery and rotates through several roles. Later an act of […]

Bee-lieve Me, This Buzzed About Book Is Bee-autiful

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I love this book so much that I don’t know if I’ll be able to talk about it without breaking down into the incoherent fangirl I am in my heart of hearts. I’m going to try though because this was one of the most unique books I’ve read in years. One to put on my shelf of favorites, push into the hands of friends (or strangers), and revisit for yearly rereads. But don’t take my word for it, take Margaret Atwood’s, who called it a […]

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NB: I received an advanced reader’s copy of this book from the Goodreads First Reads program, but that has not affected the content of my review. What the F star star cunt* did I just read. IIIIIIIIIIIII . . . have no idea how to rate this book. I have no idea how to talk about this book. I have no idea how to think about this book. I mean, on the one hand, I’m so glad something like this — so weird and weird and […]



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