Book Review: The Bees by Laline Paull

The Amazon description of The Bees by Laline Paull starts thusly:

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.

I’ll be honest, it never even occurred to me to think of the book as some dystopian society, because it is a book about bees, that gets bee culture fairly accurate. Now maybe this is because as a girl, I read all those horse and other animal books that took the point of view of an animal in their societies.

Now, there was a lot of humanization in the books I read as a tween about wild horses and how terrible it was for the young males to get kicked out of the herd by their fathers upon reaching maturity, but still, this is a style of book I am used to reading, and so I did not think of The Bees as some sort of allegorical tale.

Instead, it was a really well written book, about bees and bee culture.

Which really probably saved it for me. Because if I try to think about it in terms of Hunger Games, then we have the main character who is born special, who all the men want to be with and all the women want to be, the type of character who would annoy the hell out of me if she were written as a teenage girl.

Instead, we have a bee, a bee who is different than most of the others because the Queen mated with more than one male, and this one happened to be the offspring of one of the foreign South American bees (or something). So, she is different, and it makes sense.

Honestly, I do not know how actually well researched about bee culture the book is. A bee expert may hate it, but as a regular person, the society described in the book fits with my preconceived ideas of how bee societies work, and therefore it all makes good sense.

I enjoyed the book and read it quickly. I would absolutely recommend it. But I suggest thinking of it as a book about bees and nothing more.