The Bees

There were elements of this that were interesting, but overall I just really didn't like this book. This review's gonna be a little disjointed, but I'm laying it out then I'm ready to be done thinking about this.

I knew going in that this was supposed to be about literal bees, and I think this would have worked for me a lot better if they hadn't been so thoroughly anthropomorphized. Flora 717 made me frequently forget that she was supposed to be a bee (except when she was foraging, and then talked about smells and the most delicious flowers ad nauseum). I literally thought of the Sage caste of bees as human priestesses, because they didn't seem to have any elements that made them literal bees other than having claws? But also, Flora's human emotions bothered me, because if I'm supposed to believe that the good of the hive is the most important thing to every bee, her motivations, feelings, grief , particularly about the eggs she wasn't supposed to be laying, did not make sense.

I think I also would have been less irritated if, right off the bat, Paull hadn't set precedents for how the characterization ought to be, then broken every one of them. The bees are all born of a certain kin. The Flora kin are sanitation bees, of the lowest caste, mute and required to serve the hive through cleanliness for their entire lives. The next thing you learn is that, if a bee is not able to be useful, or has a deformity, the police come and kill her.

So the first thing in the book that happens is that Flora is born, she can talk, she is way bigger than all the rest of the bees, and a Sage priestess decides to prevent the police from killing Flora. (Which, I mean that precedent of All Nonconforming Beings Must Die is terrible, but like, this is one page after that rule was laid out! Just leave that out if it's not important!) Instead, the Sage is like, let's do an experiment - you're gonna work in the nursery, feeding larva babies. Flora has Ambition. She wants to work with the older larvas! She wants to have her own eggs, secretly, even though she knows that only the queen is allowed, and that she will die if she does. The Sage is like, no, go back to sanitation. But somehow, Flora works like every job in the hive, cleaning and serving food, and serving the queen, and doing the priestesses' jobs, and foraging for nectar, and is just AMAZING at all of them. She's just awesome at everything! And can go back and forth to sanitation as it's convenient for her and nobody ever questions anything.

Also, the bees literally just want to bask in the love of their queen mother. They use the Lord's Prayer, and just sub in Mother instead of Father. (“Our Mother, who art in labor, hallowed be thy name...”) and that literally made me roll my eyes. It felt lazy, that there was so much Christian rhetoric used when they could not have had any concept of human religion. They don't even recognize that the beekeeper is a human, just something that tears open the hive and steals from the Treasury. I understand the idea of worshiping the mother, as the queen is literally the center of the hive, but everything bad that happens in the hive is because of sin, wanting things is sin, not following the hive mind is sin, thinking you're better than your caste is a sin.

And oh, the ending was so bad. It was so not good. So not believable.

Glad I'm done with it.