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The Bees: A Novel
The Bees: A Novel
The Bees: A Novel
Audiobook10 hours

The Bees: A Novel

Written by Laline Paull

Narrated by Orlagh Cassidy

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

()

About this audiobook

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.

Flora 717 is a sanitation worker, a member of the lowest caste in her orchard hive where work and sacrifice are the highest virtues and worship of the beloved Queen the only religion. But Flora is not like other bees. With circumstances threatening the hive’s survival, her curiosity is regarded as a dangerous flaw but her courage and strength are an asset. She is allowed to feed the newborns in the royal nursery and then to become a forager, flying alone and free to collect pollen. She also finds her way into the Queen’s inner sanctum, where she discovers mysteries about the hive that are both profound and ominous.

But when Flora breaks the most sacred law of all—daring to challenge the Queen’s fertility—enemies abound, from the fearsome fertility police who enforce the strict social hierarchy to the high priestesses jealously wedded to power. Her deepest instincts to serve and sacrifice are now overshadowed by an even deeper desire, a fierce maternal love that will bring her into conflict with her conscience, her heart, her society—and lead her to unthinkable deeds.

Thrilling, suspenseful and spectacularly imaginative, The Bees gives us a dazzling young heroine and will change forever the way you look at the world outside your window.

Editor's Note

Hive mentality...

Incredibly imaginative, this thrilling and suspenseful tale of a bee—yes, an actual bee—who dares to differ from her kind is a spectacularly wrought tale, with as much to say about human nature as hive mentalities.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperAudio
Release dateMay 6, 2014
ISBN9780062333551
Author

Laline Paull

London-born and of Indian heritage, Laline Paull studied English at Oxford, screenwriting in Los Angeles, and theater in her home city. Her most recent novel is The Bees, which was a resounding critical and commercial success in the United States and Britain. She lives in the English countryside with her family.

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Reviews for The Bees

Rating: 3.8596898654263563 out of 5 stars
4/5

645 ratings90 reviews

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Enjoyable read, as a bee keeper there were several things inconsistent with bees and bee behavior but setting that aside throughout the book unveiled a colorful and highly detailed world. I loved how it was a reflection of our world as well. There are so many themes and paradigms to reflect upon. Would be a great book for a book club or school, as I feel I would like to further analyze and tease out many aspects. If there were a cliff notes type of analysis I would read that as well. The story has such depth and richness to it which hasn’t even found its way into my mind thus yet. Good read, enjoyable and you have to love and admire Flora 717!

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I loved the last half chapters of the book...it was magical and beautifully written.. however, the first half was boring and slow
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Weird but fun and maybe educational? I recommend if you want a total change of pace when it comes to novels.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Exquisite detail of the how’s and why’s of the working classes in a bee colony. Putting human voices thoughts and feelings on each class without dumbing down. I cheered laughed and cried.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    this was a beautiful story. until the very end i was hooked. it is so thematic, and it’s characters so engaging. the last two chapters had me nearly in tears. and the crazy part? it’s about bees.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I loved it. I was looking for something new and different and this was fantastic! I would absolutely recommend it,it only took me around two days to finish it and it was so interesting
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Lovely book. Best I've read in a long time. thoroughly recommended - like Watership Down with bees. Cried in the end.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I really enjoyed this book. It is a fantasy about humanized bees which has a lot of truth about bees, human society and the earth. It is manages to be environmentally aware and not depressing. Amazing!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    If you're a beekeeper you should definitely give this a try. At first, I was troubled by the caste system superimposed on the classification by age, but eventually, I became accustomed to it, and it does help motivate the plot. The framing narrative is awful and trite, but mercifully short. The whole book is replete with sex and violence and terror.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This book was quite a surprise! It was a novel about bees! It was life in the hive. Flora 717 was born into one of the lower castes of bees, a sanitation worker. It is her story throughout the book as she meets priestesses, drones, the Queen, the fertility police, and treacherous spiders. This is a world where only the Queen can breed, deformity means death, and the mantra inside the hive is accept, obey, and serve. I was unaware that this was originally written as a YA dystopian novel. I would certainly never describe it as YA or dystopian; I would classify it as as an adult sci/fantasy. This book was wildly imaginative. I would describe it as Animal Farm on steroids. I would think some of the parallels would be too complex for most young adults (teens). This is the ultimate world building novel. Had I known it was actually ABOUT bees, I probably would not have purchased the book, but I'm glad I did. It's refreshing to read outside ones genre comfort. 5 stars for creativity, 3 1/2 stars for readability.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I really struggled to get into this - the writing is fine and the plot feels action-packed, but I couldn't really bring myself to care about the 'characters'.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This book was one of the most creative that I have listened to thus far. The character was very well fleshed out. The pacing of the story was just right. And the voice actress to read this did an amazing job.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Wonderfully written
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    amazing book from an amazing perspective
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Very detailed, rich story of the life of bees within a hive. Excellently written.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    [The Bees] by [[Laline Paull]]; Orange/Baileys S/L, 2015; (5*)I read this one in bed in two nights. What a fascinating read. I was enchanted by the storytelling and the characters of the bees. The only thing I can find myself comparing this book to is the movie [Bugs] and I loved it even more.[The Bees] is a very nicely done bit of fiction on the life of the hive and all of the workers & the queen therein. I loved reading about the hierarchy of the hive and all of the different jobs of the workers told in the voice of a sanitation worker. I realize that this is a work of fiction but it has spurred me on to find a good nonfiction book on bees. I can definitely see why this one is on the short list for the Bailey's Women's Fiction prize.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I really got engrossed in this book. I listen as I work and I found myself paying closer attention to the bees as I went about my day. I highly recommend this book. It was surprisingly good.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The writing is really good. The story drew me right in. What is it about? It is possible that The Bees will defy review. I have read a lot of reviews that compare this book to A Handmaid's Tale, or decided it's a story about race or gender bias or the environment. I don't really think so. I think it's a story about bees, if a hive went dystopian and nobody really noticed. So if an author could insert themselves into the life of a hive and write a novel of a bee who notices that all is not right with the hive and decided to maybe do something about it, wouldn't that be cool? Even better, this bee turns out to be just herself, brave, heroic, and kind, but just herself. So, I think you should read it and make it about whatever you want, because that's what stories are for.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The novel follows one plucky little bee, Flora 717, from the moment she first breaks out of her wax cell and begins life in the hive. The hive itself is reimagined almost like a palace in a fantasy novel, where the beautiful and benevolent Queen sits in her chambers exuding love to her subjects, her priestesses keep order with merciless efficiency, the spoilt drone princes carouse and preen - and at the very bottom of the heap the Flora bees, or sanitation workers, clean up quietly and without fuss. This Flora, however, is an anomaly in the hive, and her unusually wide-ranging capabilities take her from the nursery to the gardens of the city and back again.What Paull has woven against the backdrop of an ordinary orchard beehive is ingenious. She has created a deep lore encompassing everything from the hive mind to a beekeeper's visits, and manages to make an event as apparently trivial as a marauding wasp into a genuinely nail-biting scene. I absolutely loved it; I was gripped from start to finish, my heart was pounding at several points, I cried more than once, and I think little Flora 717 might turn out to be one of my favourite and most memorable characters of recent years.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Such a good novel. Really hallucinogenic. Set in a hive where the walls are frescoed with scent. Scent is a solid, veiling faces, blocking paths, imparting information and controlling minds. The bees are anthropomorphised just enough that you can understand what’s going on and care. The book is really about us.The bees live in a monarchical theocracy. Paull has a lot to say on the subject. It put me in mind of a mix of Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Handmaid’s Tail (but with bees). She has a lot to say about human behaviour regardless of the political system, particularly about crime and sin and how we deal with it. From the descriptions I take it that the hive is infected with the Deformed Wing Virus. They take the symptoms to be a result of crime and perform scapegoating rituals to keep the blame contained. They take thelytokous parthenogenesis to be a sin and perform human (I mean bee) sacrifices to remove the sin from society. This raises a number of disturbing questions in my mind. Questions about human agency, questions about where blame lies and how it can be moved around, preferably away from us.Unfortunately there’s no time to answers as the pace of this book is break-neck. I read 250 pages in a single sitting.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Bees are pretty awesome, people. This book does a great job at conveying the intricate structure of bee life. While the dangerous scenes were every bit as fearsome as you could hope for (and yes, as always, wasps are assholes), there was still an emotional connection I found difficult to quite make. Also, the whole motherhood thing just didn't do it for me, but overall, this novel gave quite an interesting personification of bees. I'd recommend Clan Apis if you're on a roll.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    This book was lent to me by a friend who compared it to Watership Down. Not my kind of thing really, and maybe anyone who likes Watership Down would like this too. It contains a lot of bee lore but doesn't quite follow it through. Because some of the detail is accurate, the bits that are are not accurate stand out and are annoying.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    From the moment she emerges out of her cell Flora 717 is not like the other bees. She has been born a sanitation bee, meant to clean and to take orders from all other orders of bees. But unlike her sisters she can talk. And soon she learns that she can be more. She can nurse and forage. She can become more than what she was born into.

    But the bees of her hive live according to order and caste. The Sage sisters, the priestesses of the hive seem to have plans of their own, and in this time of shortage and uncertainty are they damaging the good of the hive? Or is the actions of Flora 717 that are so terrible?

    I’m sure the very premise of this book is off-putting to some. How could someone write an entire book about the fictionalised life of a bee? And een if they did, why would anyone read it?

    Well, that second one is an easy one to answer, because it isn’t every day that a novel has a bee as its hero. The unusual often grabs people’s attention. Yes, some may be put off by it, but I’m sure that most of those who read the book will enjoy it. I know I did.

    The first thing you learn when reading The Bees is that Flora is a bee. She isn’t a human dressed up as a bee. She behaves according to instinct and chemical prompting. Her reactions and actions are not what a person might or might not do, although of course they are actions created by a human mind. Still, in many ways her world is utterly alien to the human world.

    Which makes the book all the more entertaining if you ask me.

    There is a rigid caste system1 which means that you can read this book as a commentary on human society and tyrannical power systems. There are hints of racism and prejudice everywhere. Every insect but bees are unclean and looked down on by the bees. And the different castes within the hive look down and compete with one another for power, if high ranking enough.

    There is intrigue and action. Some of it very bloody and graphic, but that is nature in operation.

    I originally decided to read this book because the author, Paull, is the British daughter of first-generation Indian immigrants and so it fitted into my Diverse Universe reading. Unfortunately I didn’t get it finished in time but I’m still really glad to have read it. It is a book that delights in being different from the usual human-centered stories. And it also highlights some of the plights of the honeybee today; pesticides, single crop farming, lack of native plants etc.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Flora 717 is on the bottom rung of the hive. Given the lowest task of ensuring it is clean she has only three orders.

    Accept, obey and serve.

    She, like her sisters, are prepared to sacrifice everything for their beloved Queen. But Flora has skills that mark her out as different from a regular sanitation worker; normally it would ensure that she would be eliminated. Trusted enough to feed the newborn bees, she begins her ascent of the strict hierarchy in the hive, and becomes a forager collecting the life giving nectar. But this simple bee also holds a secret; a desire to break the most sacrosanct of laws in the hive, one that her enemies would use against her without any hesitation.

    There were a few things that I liked about this; the dystopian feel of the book; the totalitarian society and strict etiquettes of the bees, and the sole protagonist (can you call a bee that?) who sets out to fulfil her yearning. But it didn’t quite do it, for me. The plot wasn’t too bad, but even with the twists felt a little predictable and it felt a lot like Animal Farm by Orwell, where it is alien and familiar at the same time. It was a shame really as other have really liked it and I thought that I would too. 2.5 stars overall.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    The author deserves praise for creativity, that's for sure. However, the whole allegory fell flat for me. I just couldn't get into the story. Some parts were promising, but most of the time I found myself wanting to skip large chunks of boring text to see what actually happened and not much did. Some parts were very repetitive and characters all seemed cartoonish and superficial. There was no character development at all. I wonder if this book was actually marketed for YA readers. I couldn't even finish it (with less than 30 pages left), which happens very rarely for me.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I was just blown away by this book, I thought it was incredible. It's the story of a lowly sanitation worked in a beehive, told from the moment of her birth. At least, that's how she starts out, but she is an exceptional bee - perhaps a mutation, and she can move through the different, highly stratified ranks of bee society like no other. It completely immerses you in the life of a bee, in the way a good SF novel would introduce you to life on an alien world - you get thrown in at the deep end C.J.Cherryh style, but are given enough clues to gradually orientate yourself in this strange society. Before posting a review I always like to have a look at what others on LT thought, as it often helps me get my thoughts on a book together, and I feel like this book is a bit under appreciated here. One of the criticisms of the book is that it's not very realistic a portrayal of bee society, so of course now I really want to hunt down some books about what the real story is, but for me that doesn't really matter, because if you look at the book from that SF perspective I mentioned earlier, this is just an alien world the author has created, albeit one that exists at the bottom of the garden. Also, some didn't like the luck that our main character seemed to have to survive the many cataclysms that befell the hive. There is an element of the "chosen one" narrative, or the outsider who steps beyond the boundaries of the society in order to effect great change, but again, these are established literary conventions used to tell a unique story, so I don't credit that criticism. I don't know why I feel the need to defend this novel except I have fallen deeply in love with it and wish everyone else would appreciate it like I do. For me it was perfect. Seek it out if it sounds appealing and hopefully you'll enjoy it too.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The Bees is a lot of fun if you're interested in speculating on what a society run by scents, hormones, and deindividuation would be like. Which I am! There isn't much in the way of characters or plot-- things just sort of happen to Flora 717, our main character bee, until about 60% of the way through when she starts making her own decisions. A nice piece of scifi that has me reaching for books about bees.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Disclaimer: This book was a Christmas gift. I'm not sure I would have finished it if it wasn't.

    Disclaimer (2): Maybe I just didn't get it because I'm dumb. Entirely possible.

    So towards the end of 2017 I read a number of books with interesting premises or plots that were ultimately a let-down because the authors just couldn't write very well. This is the opposite of that - an author who writes beautifully, but the underlying story is very meh.

    Flora 717 is a sanitation/worker bee (yes, a literal bee) - the lowest of the low, unworthy of even an actual flower name. BUT, Flora 717 is ~special~, so she can talk, count, produce 'Flow' to feed baby bees, fight off a wasp, make wax, understand the Queen's stories, forage for pollen and nectar, and ultimately give birth to and raise a future queen.

    Does this sound unrealistic? What if I told you that a wall falls away for literally no reason, at exactly the right moment to save Flora from discovery?

    Yeah.

    Would this novel/plot/character stand up to close (or even not-so-close) inspection if the author wasn't distracting us with the novelty of "but they're all bees!!1!"?

    I don't think so.

    Bees don't save you from plot holes and weak characterisation.

    Bees.

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Flora 717 is an anthropomorphized bee; an odd-bee-out in the hive's restrictive society who can work sanitation, gather pollen, and attend the queen while facing many dangers within and without. It's a playful, weird and sweet story.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Wonderfully written, this novel takes you into the mind of a bee! The descriptions are amazing.